East Lothian Ploughing Match

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East Lothian is known as the Bread Basket of Scotland and agriculture plays a big part in the local economy.  Today was the East Lothian Ploughing Association Tractor Ploughing Match at Hedderwick Hill in West Barns and so I decided to grab my camera bag and head down to grab some atmospheric shots of the vintage tractors and competitors.

 I used to cover some of the ploughing matches for the Grantham Journal in Lincolnshire when I was a staff photographer at the paper but I haven't been to one of these events since 1999.  However I do remember that the images I came back with for the reports in the Journal were always some of my favourites as there is plenty of colour and human interest.

 Unlike my time at the paper the images I took today were for my own pleasure so there was no pressure to come up with an image my editor would be happy with but I still approached it with the same attitude.  

 I decided to fixed the 56mm f1.2 to my X-T1 and put the 3 stop ND filter on the front so I could shoot at f1.2 to give a shallow depth of field to the images.  I also fitted the 55-200mm zoom to the X-Pro1 to give me a bit of flexibility.  I also used the 10-24mm wide angle zoom for some of the shots.

 Here are a selection of images from today


























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