Record Photographer Clifford Oto's Blog

The subject of the next Readers Photo Challenge assignment, “landscape,” has been the staple of photography since its beginning nearly 200 years ago.

A landscape is something that takes in the beauty of the natural world. Some believe that a a perfect landscape should reveal a land that appears untouched by human hands. While that’s one way to do it, you can also add a person, animal or small farm building as small a point of interest in your composition to help give the scene some scale or to give some context to the photo. In the same vein you can have a horse or cow gazing on a hillside or pasture or a fence in the foreground can help lead the viewer’s eye into the photo.

Most landscapes are shot with a wide angle lens. This allows you to take in the entire scene. A pitfall that many new photographers fall into is that they don’t include a foreground in their wide angle photos. Adding a prominent helps to give some visual interest to an often neglected part of a landscape and can help draw the viewer into the scene. Having something like a flower or tree up front can give your composition more dimension.

You can also take a landscape with a telephoto lens. My old photo instructors always used to tell me that there photos within photos. The would show examples of overall scenes and then cropped versions that showed interesting details. Don’t be afraid to try a long lens on a landscape. I’ve shot sunsets where the majority of the color was at the horizon line and by using a telephoto, it helped me to capture that beauty that might have been lost with a wide angle.

Try to do your shooting at either early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the quality of light is the best. If you’re on a trip, try to schedule your picture-taking around those times. While you’ll find that there is less of it, the light is warmer and comes in at a more pleasing angle.

Keep your fingers crossed for a sky with clouds in it. A sky full of clouds helps to give more visual interest than one without. Looks for clouds that have some shape to them and have some gaps between them so you can see some blue sky. Avoid the kinds clouds that blanket the sky with very little to no discernible features.

Try adding some sort of water feature to your landscape if you can. A river or stream meandering through you photo can help lead at the viewer’s eyes into your composition. By placing a still lake or pond in the foreground you can use the reflections as a compositional element.


The terrain of California is very diverse. From mountains to deserts, on can find nearly every kind of geological setting once can imagine. The Sierras and Mother Lode are great places to find your landscape but there are closer places was well. The Delta, which is in our backyard, is also a wonderful place to shoot landscapes. Wherever you might go, keep your mind and eyes open and, photographically speaking, it will be the land of opportunity.

How to enter:

1. Entries can be emailed to coto@recordnet.com. Type in “Landscape” in the subject line.
2. Photos have to be shot between October 29 and November 12.
3. The number of photos is limited to no more than 12 per person
4. Include your name (first and last), hometown, and the kind of device you used and where it was taken (eg.: “John Doe of Stockton. Lodi Lake, Lodi. iPhone6s”)

5. If there is a recognizable person in the photo, please identify them (name, age, hometown) and what they are doing in the photos (eg.: “Jane Doe, of Manteca, casts her fishing line in Lodi Lake in Lodi”). 

6. Please feel free to include any interesting anecdotes or stories on how you took the picture.

7. The deadline for submission is November 12. The top examples will be published on November 19 with an online gallery of all the photos on the same day.

Today is National Pumpkin Day. Pumpkins aren’t San Joaquin County’s number one crop. According to the latest county crop report that mantle goes to almonds . Pumpkins aren’t even second (grapes). However, San Joaquin county produces the most pumpkins statewide. In fact, we’re second in the entire country in pumpkin growing just behind Tazewell County in Illinois. In 2018, San Joaquin County grew 2,180 acres of the orange gourd predicting 57,800 tons for a value of more than $21 million accounting for about 90% of the pumpkins grown in California.

Ryan Van Groningen runs Van Groningen and Sons farms along with his cousins Paul and Jason. The farm was started by his great-grandfather Henry Van Groningen, Sr. in the Manteca/Ripon area in 1939. In the 40s they grew pumpkins for canning only. It wasn’t until the 1960s and ‘70s when Halloween became more popular did they start growing them for decorative use.

The Van Groningens grow 45 different varieties of pumpkins on about 1,500 acres. While the traditional carving type pumpkins are grown on most of those acres, they also produce the tiny palm-sized type to the variety that can reach up to 150-pounds. The seasons starts around the last week in August and last up until Halloween. 

Harvesting pumpkins is rather a simple affair but hard, back-breaking work. First, farmworkers the pumpkin are hand cut from the vines from which they grow. As they’re cut, they’re placed in rows wide enough apart to accommodate a tractor pulling a pair of semi-trailers. At a walking pace, the tractors make their way through the field and farmworkers on either side of the trailers reach down an pick up a pumpkin in each hand. They toss them up to fellow farmworkers on the trailer who catch them and gently place them into the trailer’s bin. Once the bins are full, the tractor leaves and the process starts over again. 

The picked pumpkins are trucked back to the Van Groningen and Sons packing shed on Jack Tone Road in Manteca. There they are washed, sized sorted and packed. Ryan Van Groningen says that they ship pumpkins all across the western U.S. This year there’s a shortage in the Midwest and East, so they’re sending their products as far as Florida under the label Pamper’d Farms. So almost no matter where you get your pumpkin, there’s a likelihood that it came from San Joaquin County.

TOP LEFT: Edison High student Emmanuel Huerta, 17, left, receives a free laptop computer from Stockton Scholars volunteer Janae Aptaker in the Library at Edison High School. TOP RIGHT: Some of the 637 free laptop computers to be given out to students in the library at Edison. MIDDLE: Edison High student Elias Ororzco checks out the free laptop computer he got at the library at Edison High School. The Stockton Unified School District and the 1 Million Project Foundation have teamed up to recycle and hand out 3,500 used district laptop and internet hotspot devices to SUSD students who have otherwise hot previously had internet access at their homes. About 637 laptops were give out to Edison students. BOTTOM LEFT: SUSD special projects administrator Brooke Shields, left, gives an internet hotspot device to Edison student Dagoberto Mendoza, 16. BOTTOM RIGHT: Edison High student Jerelyn Tello, 17, left, receives a free laptop computer at Edison High School. CLIFFORD OTO/THE RECORD]

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