Central Pennsylvania Farm Scene, Mid-November

While riding the bus on Tuesday, I noticed while looking out the window that one of the local farmers had made some lovely round bales recently, which were scattered throughout one of the fields I pass every day.When I first saw them on Tuesday, the bales were covered in light snow, and my fingers were practically twitching to take photos of them. While I couldn't really do anything about it at the time, I decided that the very next morning, I would attempt to stop and capture a few shots. (I originally thought they were hay bales, but a friend informed me they are cornstalk bales. Who knew?)

It snowed a tiny bit on Tuesday night, and so Wednesday morning when I stopped, the bales were once again covered in a fresh light powder of snow. I took a lot of photos - the clouds were quite dark and dramatic on the horizon - and hopped back in the car, thinking I might also stop later in the day to see what they looked like when the light was different.

But when I came by in the afternoon, I realized once again how tiny the window of opportunity can sometimes be. The field was empty! And the farmer and several helpers were loading the bales onto a flat-bed truck, even as I passed by. WOW! (This is yet another argument for "Seize the day," folks - that one time you go past and see something cool may indeed be your only chance to photograph it!)

I looked through the photo set from the morning, and while I was quite pleased with how the texture and shading turned out on some of the monochrome shots, I decided to select a color version to post here. Even as the outdoor color palette starts to fade into the browns and grays of mid-November, there is plenty of color to be found in the golds of the fields and the blue of the sky and the far hills (yes, that's our famous Mount Nittany in the distance on the left).

The soundtrack to this image is a song by John Mellencamp from one of his earliest and best albums, 1979's self-titled John Cougar (the name he went by at the time). I used another favorite song from this album in a prior (and perhaps similar) farm field blip which you can view here. This photo of a November central Pennsylvania farm scene looks like it could have been taken just about anywhere in farming country, including in the great Mid-West. And so the soundtrack is John Mellencamp, with Great Mid-West.