Sunflowers

I’m always on the lookout for interesting scenes to photograph. It’s part of the territory of being a landscape photographer. Fields of beautiful red poppies during high summer are the most sought after splashes of colour, they are few and far between and you need to know where to find them. That’s where social media comes in useful, chat and tip offs between like-minded people can point you in the right direction. 

And that’s exactly what happened a few days ago, except this location had sunflowers. First, I had to find the precise location so I immediately went off on a daytime scouting trip to find the field of golden yellow. Jackpot - I’d never seen anything quite like this field before and making some images of this incredible field of sunflowers just outside Desborough became my top priority. 

I returned for sunset on three successive evenings, the first producing adequately satisfying results and the second slightly less so, the main problem being a bank of cloud lining the horizon thereby preventing the setting sun from lighting up the sky in my composition.

Third time lucky. The sky was looking fabulous, the clouds just at the right height and density. The sun did indeed light up the sky as I always hope but it was just before sunset that provided me with my favourite image - a combination of a low setting sun with just enough height to backlight the sunflowers before me. I continued to shoot further and made an HDR Panorama of 25 images.