The Longest Day

This image is photographed at The Wildflower Farm, a favourite location of mine to go shoot flower, insects and water droplets. Closed to the public, but they still let me poke around. One of the interesting things they have are these strange bicycle-based lawn mower contraptions. The front wheel is replaced with a grass-cutting blade apparatus, surely intended to make lawn mowing a faster task…. but it looks painfully labour intensive and time consuming.

Imagine cutting an entire field with a tool such as this? I think it would be the longest day of my life. Right behind this apple tree is a fledgling meadow, but the foreground grass is carefully manicured. I hope they aren’t using these bikes to get the job done!

Oh, and this is a false-colour infrared image, shot with a modified camera. In infrared light, anything capable of photosynthesis typically glows brightly, giving a ghostly surreal look to the scene. The sky in this spectrum is often dark, and I was trying to frame the bright tree in the dark sky. This required me to set my tripod at nearly ground-level (thank you Gitzo for a removable center column) to find the right angle.

When shooting infrared, the camera will only capture the deepest reds in the visible spectrum, and also capture colours beyond our visual perception. These colours can be remapped into a range more natural to the way we see the world, usually done by swapping the red and blue colour channels as a starting point.