By Kim Baldwin, McPherson County farmer and rancher
Sixteen Junes ago my soon-to-be-husband and I had our engagement photos taken. We went into the photographer’s Main Street studio to have a number of photos taken with different backdrops that were to be used for invitations and wedding announcements in the coming months.
After our studio session, we drove out to a wheat field with our local elevator in the background and the photographer captured a few more images of us standing in the field surrounded by golden wheat.
Those wheat field images would become my favorites of that photo session, and it was something I thought we could capture annually to celebrate another year and another wheat crop together.
Little did I know that finding a time to schedule a photo session every year in a field of ripened wheat would be a challenge.
While the wheat has always been present for a photo, purposely stopping the daily workflow of farming in June to get cleaned up and dressed up to have those photos taken is another story.
That was ultimately the only wheat field photo session where we scheduled and paid a professional photographer to capture those images. It was the only wheat field photo session we intentionally planned a wardrobe around. The only wheat field photo session where we were perfectly posed.
Nonetheless, we’ve still somehow managed to get our wheat field photo session taken every year. Sometimes it takes half an hour whereas other times it’s only a few minutes. Over the years, these photos have been captured in a variety of ways.
Sometimes I’ve handed my camera over to a friend or family member with short to little notice. In other instances, I’ve just propped a cellphone up on a tailgate and set the timer in a spur of the moment photo opportunity.
While a professional hasn’t been used since those first photos were taken, and our hair hasn’t been “just right” since those first photos were captured, and a wardrobe has not been meticulously planned since those first photos, the photos we’ve logged over the years of my little family standing in a field of golden wheat have recorded something much more important to me.
They have captured our life over those years.
And while these pictures are definitely not studio-quality and most years they haven’t even been edited, they are, in my eyes, picture perfect.
“Insight” is a weekly column published by Kansas Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization whose mission is to strengthen agriculture and the lives of Kansans through advocacy, education and service.
