Roma Man in the Slovakian Countryside – My Shot of the Day, October 12, 2014

After a few days exploring the Račkova Valley we came down onto the agricultural plains of the Slovakian countryside for some larger sunset landscape photographs of the entire mountain range. Unfortunately, the clouds rolled back over the mountains and they just sat there like a gray lump while the fabulous golden hour sunlight flooded the plains.

Just across the road from where I sat, several tractors were harvesting a large field of corn. Vlado explained that it was most likely for biofuels so that the EU could meet its carbon reduction goals. This area is not a traditional corn area but thanks to subsidies from Brussels for biofuel production the traditional crops have fallen by the wayside in favor of the industrial corn production.

(For this post, I won’t go on my rant about biofuel production and the mess they have caused for wildlife, water quality, local economies and the like….)

An old blue car that tilted toward the right rumbled past me down the dirt road and parked next to the field. A family of Roma from Konská exited the car and talked to one of the men in the tractor. Then they set to work collecting the corn cobs that had been missed by the machines and loading them into a large white bag that they later tied to the top of the overloaded car.

I shot this photo while the three men and two women were picking the corn from the ground. A large truck came past to the left of the photo and kicked up a massive cloud of dust that floated over the field and the Roma and was perfectly lit by the slanted, cloud-filtered sunlight coming from the southwest.

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