ANNA M CAMPBELL PHOTOGRAPHY
Anna is a commercial photographer based in Portland, Oregon.
Send her an email at
anna at annamcampbell.com.
Tag Archives: cows
Organic Valley Photos
I’ve been asked a couple of times to post more images from my Organic Valley Shoots:
Click here for the Organic Valley gallery
Looking through these images again I’m reminded of what Organic Valley farmer said : Kids Sell Milk. After all, milk is the quintessential good for you food to give your kids. And kids and cows really are a very cute combination. These truly are family farms – who can resist buying milk from a farm where a charming youngster bottle-feeds the calves?
Dairy Shoots
I spent a good part of the summer photographing Oregon and Washington Dairies for Organic Valley. I can’t think of a better way to spend the summer than traveling through the northwest and visiting with farmers and spending time with cows and kids. In dairy, where it’s been difficult for farmers to turn a profit over the last 20 years and quite a few families have left the business, I was impressed to see second, third and even fourth generations joining the business. Organic Valley is definitely doing something to make small farms sustainable.
This is Lucky. She lives at Double J Jerseys where she enjoys grass, nose-licking, and staring at photographers.
The farmers were incredibly helpful – there’s just no way I could have done these shoots without them. With their help, I knew where the bulls were, I knew how to get over and under fences, I was fed beautiful organic and wild foods, I borrowed farm-vehicles, kids showed me where their favorite birds nests and calves were, I met all the 4-H animals, and just had a blast.
Baby cows are very curious about pig-tails.
I might have some nose-prints on my equipment.
A few words on working with cows: I LOVE COWS. They are really very fun to work with.
That said, they weigh about 1,000 pounds so I would never photograph them without talking to the farmer (this is the “don’t try this at home kids” section of the blog), finding out the location of any hazards and of course the bulls – in the freezer being best for photographic purposes. And no, I’m not talking about beef.
Cows have that prey-animal instinct to run if you approach them or make sudden movements. On the other hand, if I sat still for too long, I’d risk the whole herd getting curious, surrounding me, sniffing me, trying to lick me or my bag and generally cracking me up.
So I did a lot of walking sideways to try to get the cow I wanted in the spot I wanted for a good shot. Basically I did a lot of roaming about on green pastures surrounded by beautiful country – hard job, I know.
To see more images of OV farms, go to the Find Your Farmer section of the Organic Valley Website.
Posted in Animals, Dairy, Farms
Also tagged animals, dairy, Farms, kids, Organic Valley
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Carman Ranch
Last summer I did a shoot for the Carman Ranch website. It was fascinating working with Cory Carman, a real forward thinker in the field of grass-fed cattle ranching.
We spent a long time looking at other ranch websites debating the use of photos of cows on the site (do people want to see the animal they are eating?). Many ranches feature big bloody steaks and cowboys wrangling in clouds of dust – to which Cory replied “That’s not Carman Ranch”. After spending some time with her cows and her fields I understand why. Cory’s cattle don’t need any wrangling – they simply follow her around (she moves them every ten days so to avoid overgrazing). And she doesn’t think we should be eating enormous steaks every day, but that grass-fed beef can be a small part of a healthy, responsible diet. It’s all about the cows -and Cory believes her customers want to know how the cows are treated, rather than ignoring where meat comes from – so in the end she decided to feature them on the site.
Black angus nose in a field of new spring grass.
This outtake, one of my favorite images from the shoot, was not chosen for the site. But you can see which ones were here:
