Following his off-duty passion of 29 years, Jeff Horton has traveled – with camera – to national parks in the West and even to Colombia, South America, composing and recording the amazing landscapes that he saw. But it was a photograph of a rolled bale of hay on a Johnston County farm that he shot at sunset last Dec. 1 that won him a prize. He won the Award of Excellence earlier this fall at the 15th annual Art Faire competition sponsored by Clayton Visual Arts. It came with a cash prize of $750.
The photograph he named “Late Fall on the Farm” is a sandwich of digital images captured by his lens and camera back of the same view using exposures of varied lengths. The different exposure settings enhance the detail and illumination of the subject without affecting the composition.
Newer cameras and some smart phones offer HDR (High Dynamic Range) imagery by overlaying multiple exposures of the same image. Horton’s equipment and software take the process to a higher level that provides even more striking results.
For those who keep track of such things, he shot the photo using a Nikon D3X set at ISO 200 using a Nikon 24-120 f/4 AF-S lens at 32mm, aperture f/16 and shutter speeds (seconds) of ½, 1/3, 1/6, 1/13 & 1/25 or (+2, +1, 0, -1, -2 bracketed exposures). He also used a circular polarizing filter.
When all the processing was completed, he had a RAW image file of about 150 MB that he reduced to 24 MB, and finally to 3 to 4 MB – about the size of a digital image available on most point-and-shoot cameras. Here are the shooter’s details on the hay photograph:
It was 1986 when Horton bought his first single lens reflex (SLR) camera – a Nikon F-2E, and he’s been capturing images and trading his equipment up to professional quality since 1990, and switching from film to digital formats along the way, and finding lenses that work best for his compositions.
His work days are spent in a fully different world, yet one where attention to detail is just as important. He is assistant director for compliance in the Division of Medical Assistance where he is over the Program Integrity Unit, which combats Medicaid fraud, waste and abuse.