Sunflowers

Today, I found more cheap flowers. This time at the our local grocery store. It goes without saying, but I love photographing flowers... especially in the snow-less North Carolina winter, which doesn't offer a whole lot of compelling subjects. For three or four bucks, you can pick up something that will entertain you for the better part of a morning.

The technical details of these images are pretty similar to those for yesterday's daisies. Small aperture openings to maximize depth of field, 28-105 lens, manual focus, etc. However, it was a cloudy day in North Carolina, so I had to supplement the natural lighting coming through our kitchen windows by keeping the room lights on.


This first shot is standard fare for me. Basically, I'm just offsetting the flower to the 1/3 mark on either side of a horizontal image. I've used this formula for several other shots, such as this yellow flower at Raulston Arboretum or even this Stokes' Aster. (As an aside, I'd just comment that I really don't like that yellow flower, but it tends to be one of my most popular pictures). As with all of my images, I did sharpen this image, but otherwise, the only manipulation is some light cropping to get it to 11x14 scale.


For the second shot, I pulled out a kitchen spray bottle and gave the sunflowers a light mist. Then, I took basically the same shot as above, only this time, I cropped liberally, keeping the image at a 5x7 scale. I think the composition here is interesting and looks a bit like a sunrise.

Sadly, I'm headed back to reality on Monday, so my opportunities for photography are about to become a whole lot less frequent. I'll try to pick up some more flowers on MLK weekend, and then, the North Carolina spring should arrive 2 or 3 weeks after that. My big project for the spring will be revisiting Chapel Hill's Old Well to try to capture some nice images with better equipment. But those flowers won't come until later in the spring, so that endeavor will have to wait until March. Cheers.