Picture it – 5 photography tips to help showcase your customer’s fields this season

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Harvest time’s just around the corner and now’s the time to record your season’s successes! Don’t miss your best chance to build a powerful portfolio of crop photography and help you improve next season’s sales.

Your tireless hard work has helped customers create stunning, picturesque vistas and that deserves to be celebrated and shared. That’s why we’ve put together our top 5 photography tips to help you let your creativity blossom and take awesome shots of your farmer’s cleaner, greener fields! Using just a few of the helpful tips below you can create a library of images that’ll show potential customers the real, tangible, local results of choosing BASF fungicide products.

Best of all, you don’t need any expensive camera equipment or previous experience – just your smartphone and a little old-fashioned enthusiasm.

Remember The ‘Golden’ Rule
Want to make your pictures shine? Grab your camera (or phone) and wander down to your farmer’s fields just as the sun is rising or just before the sun starts to set. This time of day is called the ‘Golden Hour’ because the daylight is warmer and softer which makes the fields glow and lets your farmer’s crops dazzle.
A Bit Of Perspective
Photos taken at eye level can feel a bit flat and lifeless. This isn’t the photo’s (or the photographer’s) fault! The problem is that we’re used to seeing everything from eye-level so we’ve become familiar with it and it’s not surprising when we see it in a picture. So what’re the solutions?
Bring balance to the … farm. Imagine a line running down the centre of your photograph and then try to even out the two images so that they feel like they’re complimenting each other and symmetrical.
Change it up! The only limitation for camera angles is your own imagination. Taking shots from above or below can shift the perspective making the crops seem to stretch to the horizon or feel immediate and solid. You can even capture the scale of your farmer’s operation using a nearby hill or a drone.
I’m Ready For My Close Up
Close ups are a wonderful photographic way to bring the viewer into the image and make something feel like it’s actually right in front of you. Use them to showcase the crops’ qualities like colour, texture and rigidity. Potential customers will love seeing the real-life plant health benefits of using BASF fungicide products and your close ups of every part of the plant will show stress-free, disease-free, proud-standing crops.
Just remember to always move the camera closer to what you’re picturing rather than zooming in to make sure there’s no loss of picture quality.
Your Field Of Expertise
Photography is a great opportunity to be creative. Yes the crops are the star of the show but every great star needs supporting players! By adding other elements to your pictures you can avoid the monotony of too many corn close-ups. Try introducing other elements to give your pictures a little visual drama – a harvester, a building, a stream, a row of trees, a meandering river or even stormy skies can all help give your images a dynamic and dramatic punch.
See Your Pictures In A New Light
Sometimes you can have everything prepared for your shoot and then the weather decides to change. Or maybe the location is too bright with nothing to shade it. Don’t worry. Thanks to modern technology you can easily edit and refine your pictures afterwards either at home or on your smartphone itself. There are a number of great free smartphone apps that let you alter and adjust everything from brightness and contrast to hue and saturation (yeah we don’t know what they do either!) or feature preset filters which can transform your lovely compositions into fully finished photographs.

Here are just a couple of our favourite free apps:

iPhone Photos App

This great little app comes as standard on most iPhones and allows you to easily and quickly resize, filter, flip and rotate your image. It is easy to use and can really give your photos a stylised look and feel.

Adobe

Adobe is ‘the’ name in photo editing software. Used around the world by graphic designers, professional photographers, journalists, filmmakers, comic book artists and everyone in between, the Adobe products are powerful and surprisingly easy to use. Check out our two recommended programs:

Lightroom Photo Editor

Lightroom Photo Editor is an Adobe product which is used by professional and amateur photographers around the world. It is specifically designed for photo manipulation and the free to download app packs a lot of punch. By using sliders and filters you can create stunning photographic effects and really raise your pictures to the next level.

Photoshop Express Photo Editor

If Adobe is ‘the’ name in photo editing, then Photoshop is ‘the’ program that got them there. It’s so good that many people now use it as a verb to describe when something feels a bit ‘photoshopped’. Put simply it is the best photo editing program available. The app version is excellent and utilises the idea of layers (images virtually stacked on each other) to enable you to blend multiple images at once or tweak and improve your pictures and hide mistakes. It is simple to use and even the basic free functions can transform any picture through preset filters and all the standard adjustment controls.

Snapseed

Snapseed is a photo editing software which, unlike the Adobe programs mentioned above, was specifically designed to be used on mobile devices. Available on both iOS and Android, Snapseed has much the same functionality as the others but because it was made for mobile can be easier to use.

Instagram

There’s a reason why everyone’s always throwing things up on the ‘Gram and this programs easy to master photo editing system is definitely one of them. You just snap your photo, crop the image and then choose your filter. Then you can choose to either post it to your Instagram feed or save it to your photo album. Sharing your Instagram feed of dynamic crop pictures with potential customers could land you that next big deal.