A Scenic World

When I spotted this little poppy growing along the roadside, I was pretty sure I had a keeper waiting. The trick was finding the keeper. Although I only show a few shots here, in reality I took 18 photos over the course of a few minutes trying to get the photo right.

When I walked up, this is what I saw. Immediately I saw the potential: the flower was by itself with no grass really competing with it in the plane of focus. The sun was behind me, so I thought I might have a good backlit shot, and I LOVE backlighting. I think that a lot of people forget to turn around to see what the view behind them looks like; in this case, I walked right past the flower to get “behind” it.

But this is what it looks like from above (I bet you’ve seen a flower photo taken from this angle before):

The flower is kind of squashed closed, which makes it a perfect candidate for a shot at f/2.8. These are rare in the flower world, because the depth of field is so shallow. Any three-dimensionality means that some portion is going to be out-of-focus, but the flatter it is, the more likely you are to have it all be in focus.

So I move behind it. This is the view from that vantage point. You see that the road curves and that the flower is at the bottom of the embankment. The flower itself isn’t directly lit, but the bushes at the curve are bright with the setting sun:

The hard part is going to be lining up the shot perfectly so that we make the most of the brightly-lit parts behind the flower without overpowering the flower itself. Let’s take a closer look at what we’re dealing with here:

Ah, there is one blade of grass in the way! I moved it out of the frame (something I hate to do, but my rule of thumb is that if it could have occurred in nature, then it’s fair game).

But the first step is to get DOWN.

This was my first attempt. Gah, the brightly-lit road is bleeding into the frame something terrible.

I get even lower and try to get a bit of the bushes at the curve into the shot to see if they’ll make pretty bokeh, but at that distance, they’re just a smear of indefinite light that detracts from the flower itself. And I’m still not close enough to really use that aperture of f/2.8 to blur out the blades of grass effectively.

Oooh, this is almost there. I’ve adjusted the settings so that I’m now shooting at f/3.5 to try to get as much definition as possible out of the petals. Those blades of grass are still kind of distracting though, so I go back to f/2.8. So long as I nail the focus, I think the lens can handle it.

It all almost comes together in this attempt.  But I think there’s just a little too much blank space at the top of the shot, so we try again:

At last! I was honestly a little undecided during the post-processing phase whether I should go with this one, which is just a tiny bit too far to the left for my liking, or the one above. I post-processed them both but ended up going with this one. I just love the way it snakes through the frame.

I’ll leave it to your imagination to picture just how far down I had to get to take these photos. Suffice it to say that I had trouble straightening my knees after balancing on them so long on that asphalt. I had to try to brush the stray bits of grass and dirt from my hair before walking back into town. But was it worth it? Today my knees don’t remember the pain, and my hair is clean of debris. And I still have the shot!

And tomorrow: the processing!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 5:03 am and is filed under Photography Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.