For a recent personal project, Washington, D.C.-based commercial photographer and director Eli Meir Kaplan headed down to Sunny Ridge Farm in Gaithersburg, Maryland to photograph a day in the life of their corn harvesting process.
Sunny Ridge Farm is a third-generation, 1,800-acre cash grain operation. Eli knew the owner, Drew Stabler, from a project he worked on a few years ago which made it fairly simple for him to access. Eli has always valued family farms as an integral yet endangered part of America’s social fabric, so this project was right up his alley:
I always enjoy meeting people from different backgrounds than myself and learning how they work. It was interesting to see how corn is harvested. I was also fascinated by the system of silos that Drew built to dry, store and transfer grain to trucks. They were huge and looked like something out of a science fiction movie. At one point a belt overloaded and kernels were raining from the sky.
The photos turned out great, and are being used for email and print promos. Check them out below!