Welcome to the farm!

Hi,

Well, I finally went and did it. I got a Fujifulm GFX-100 Mark-I to replace my venerable Pentax 645D. I have an idea to return to the North Carolina coast over the course of this year to do another series of Lighthouse shots. This time at dusk with their lights on. The Kodak CCD isn't up to that being a bit too noisy. The 100 MP sensor isn't only CMOS with lower noise, it is Back Side Illuminated. We shall see how it does.

In the meantime,having just received it,. I wanted to shoot something here on the farm. But, it's an ugly time of year being Winter. Now NC doesn't get much snow, but here we had some last week. Not as much as I had hoped for as you can still see the dormant pasture grass. But, it's as good as we are likely to get this year. And, I went out under the clouds because I knew what little white we did get was going to rapidly Go Away as soon as the clouds began breaking up.

We grow hardshell gourds here for the arts and craft market. My wife being the super arts and crafts person. I'm into electronics R&D but grew up in farm country mostly growing corn and alfalfa for dairy cows, but I can help her when it comes to actually growing the gourds.

View out the back door of the house. You can see the Gourd Arches, which is where we grow the small ornamental gourds. To the left is the chicken pen, but no chickens to be seen.

View down the drive to the house. The gourd patches to the left are just out of frame. Nothing to see there right now anyway. You can see some of one patch to the right. I call this my front lawn, although it's actually five different pasture grasses.

View from the far end of the gourd arches out back, looking back towards the house. The workshop has an upstairs where my amateur radio station is, hence all the antennas you see. You can also see the tractor shed which holds four machines, but it's a bit dark under that roof.

Here is a view down The Backhoe Road which heads to the Cape Fear River. It's a narrow strip between two other properties until you get to the bottom of the hill where there is four acres of a nice place to go swimming and fishing. Once it gets to looking nice around here, I'll post a shot or two.

I ought to explain The Backhoe Road. We do have a backhoe here, but the reference is to a short line railroad near here which ran from New Hill where the main line is North to Durham where the tobacco processing plants were. They called that short line Tobacco Road. It's a hiking/biking trail these days called The American Tobacco Trail. I like the name Tobacco Road better. ;)

And we used both a backhoe and a bulldozer to create that road to the river, so the name fits that way as well.

To get these ready for posting, I quartered each shot (reduced 50% in each direction) and Jpeg compressed them. This thing spits out a lot of data. The Raw files are around 90 MB each....

Stan

Lovely photos and a beautiful location.

Hi,

Thanks. We enjoy our small farm. There are a few 20-30 acre farms along the river. You have to build on a high spot because the river backs up into the lower sports every time we get rains from a hurricane here. So that limits the building areas quite a bit. All the large farms on higher ground are rapidly being turned into housing developments one farm at a time.

Hi,

Since the dim light prevented seeing any equipment hibernating in the shed, here is a shot from a few years ago where I got some of it out and lined up for a family portrait. This is with the Pentax 645D which has a different look from the Kodak CCD. The backhoe isn't in this one, though. I was showing a family resemblance here. The two on the left, one wheel tractor and one crawler, are really the same machines until the wheels wind up replaced with a track system. Same for the two on the right.

The left pair are earlier, 1950 and 1958 and were my Dad's. The ones on the left are 1988 and 2008 and are ones I bought.

Also, the gourd arches look so bare in the earlier shot. I dug up one taken with the 645D when we only had one arch up and not two. But that one is loaded up and you can see what they are all about.

It's a lot easier to harvest those small gourds when they are hanging in the air rather than laying on the ground. ;)

They are made from cutting up some steel fence posts into stakes for anchors and then arching 16 foot long cattle panels between the rows of fence post stakes. The plants are in rows along the outside and the vines grow up the panels. With some help from the farmer to guide them up there.

Stan

Hi,

I'm not much into DX. More into propagation. I work all bands from 160m up to 48 GHz. The most used ones are the usual 2m and then 6m, 220 MHz, 440 MHz then 80m and 160m on HF. Plus a 10m FM station as part of that propagation stuff.

I don't run more than 100 watts anywhere and on HF that's enough to work the world. One of these days, I want to add an EME station. That's bouncing signals off the moon to talk to the other side of the Earth.

Stan

Lovely house / farm you have there Stan, and enjoy the new camera

Hi,

Thanks! And still learning the new camera. So, part of that was taking a shot of the main operating position in the ham shack.

There are other tables with other stuff on them, but this table in front of the window is the main part of the station.

There are nine radios in use here, even though a couple are blocked by the boom microphone. The HF rig on the left is from 1983 and used mainly for 10m FM (as you see on the display) and 160m CW. It also works as a diversity receiver for use in conjunction with the HF rig on the right (which is a current model).

Then there is a 6m all mode rig on the right side. On the left are three 2m radios, one 220 MHz one, and two 440 MHz ones. Plus there is a 10th radio which is a dedicated alert receiver for the US National Weather Service.

There is one piece of test equipment, which is a frequency counter, which has two telescopic antennas on it. One for the lower frequencies and one for the higher frequencies. They look like rabbit ears, but not quite. None of these radios use an external frequency reference. The counter does, which is a GPS Disciplined Oscillator. I have 10 Mhz downstairs in the electronics lab and ran a line up to the counter. That lest me see if any of the radios need their internal oscillators adjusted without having to drag radios downstairs to check.

Stan

Hi,

OK. Playing a bit here with the Pentax 645 120mm macro lens on the GFX-100.

My wife has made a decorated birdhouse gourd as a sample for an arts and crafts class she is going to teach. As such she needed some pics of it. She has this lightbox for such work and her own camera. But, after she finished, I had to mess some.

This is just one side of it. She shot all four sides, including the front with the hole in it for the bird. But I'll save everyone the rest of the shots. This one will do to illustrate what people do with the gourds we grow on the farm in our spare time.

Stan

The tiny Fujifilm GFX 100 from 2019? Oh my, it’s quite a piece!! Congratulations on your purchase 👍🏼
I have a feeling you're going to have a lot of fun. 😉

Can't wait to see the next photos taken with this superb Fujifilm MF.

Hi,

OK, my wife has finished her hummingbird decorated birdhouse gourd. So, new shots were required.

As usual, I let her shoot with her Nikon d3500 and then I came in behind her with my Fujifilm GFX-100 and P645 120mm macro lens.

And then she wanted a copy of my shots. Heh.

This is proving to be a very popular class for her to teach. She took the sample with her to the Gourd Patch meeting last weekend.....

Stan