Western Sunflowers in a Short Grass Prairie

Westernsunflowers

Description:

I lugged about 40 pounds of photo gear out to a Ohio prairie complex hoping to get shots of some rare orchids and dragonflies. Orchids were done blooming and dragonflies were quite rare. So this compelled me to take a different approach to my usual take on flower photography. 1000’s of Western sunflowers were blooming in a dry sandy area of the prairie complex and I chose to shoot them backlit by late morning sun.

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Pertinent technical details or techniques:

D500 200-400mm f4 +1.4x teleconverter=490mm (1/60 sec at f9.0, ISO 100) Levels, desaturate yellow, crop for comp, Topaz DeNoise.
Is this a composite? (focus stacks or exposure blends are not considered composites)

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3 Likes

Wonderful take on a difficult subject! The right parts are sharp and the others are delightfully soft. The BG flowers are so perfectly OOF and the lens aperture has rendered such pleasing bokeh – in the original sense of its meaning as the smooth optical quality of the OOF areas.

I’m trying to decide if I like the amount of visual weight in the left half or if I would crop in about 1/5 from the right…

2 Likes

Nice Jim. You never know what will present itself when you go out with your camera. You made a lovely image, even though that wasn’t in the plan book for the day.

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Beautiful capture, Jim! I love the background blurred flowers and that the front in focus ones are the underside of the flowers. It looks so bright and cheery!

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Jim, the image is really nice. Made more so by the colorful and complimentary out of focus background. You got some reward for hefting that 40lbs! :grinning:

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