Death And Dying On The Kansas Plains

Death and dying surround the Immanuel Lutheran Church. Across the road, you have the old cemetery with burials starting in 1882 and continuing until as recently as 2018. The old church and school are still standing but are slowly decaying. Next to the church and school is a row of large dead trees. Even in death they stand guard. As you’d expect, time takes its toll. The trees are slowly falling, limb by limb. All of this taking place on the desolate Kansas plains with only a creaking oil pumpjack and some oil tanks to keep them company. As a result, it all combines to create a melancholy mood.

It may seem strange to find beauty in such a melancholy setting. However, death and dying, in all its forms is a natural part of our existence. As the saying goes, “None of us get out of this alive.” I think we have to embrace all aspects of our existence, short as it may be. The good, the bad, the melancholy. At best, we have to find the beauty in life. At the least, we have to accept the inevitable. After all, we only get one shot at this so we have to make it count.

Oops, My Bad

In my last post, I mentioned this scene of death and dying. In that post I said:

Unfortunately, I didn’t see a composition that I liked and combined all of these elements in one shot. And I’m okay with that. This is because I’ve learned that sometimes you have to drop nice elements from the composition to minimize distraction from the subject.

It is true that you have to sometimes drop nice elements to minimize distracting attention away from the subject. However, the part about not being able to find a composition that I like that combined all of the elements in a way that I like turned out not to be true. I was wrong. It seems that in my review of hundreds of photos from the road trip, I overlooked a couple of shots. I just found a shot that combined the cemetery, church, school and dead trees in a pleasing way. It is only missing the oil pumpjack but its value to the scene was more auditory than visual, so it is not a big loss to the composition. I’m very happy I found them.

The main issue I had with the other photos that included the cemetery is that they were oriented towards the sun in such a way the clouds became blown out and it was difficult to get an appealing composition even when you could get a good exposure.

The Shot

So, not that we’ve got all that straight, here’s the shot.

Taking The Shot

The gear and settings were:

• Canon 5D Mk III, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM Lens at 32mm
• 1/50 seconds at f/16, ISO 100

I processed the image using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop along with Nik Silver Efex for the black and white conversion. While the bulk of the processing was done in Photoshop I did use Nik Silver Efex as a starting point for my black and white. The Nik settings are good but I prefer to adjust them for may tastes.

Leave A Comment And Share

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