Dried Sunflowers, Flat Lay

Timeless
Sunflowers

We love sunflowers. Their structure while growing, their visual impact, their following the sun, the insects they attract, the birds they feed in the winter months. Each seed a little store of energy. These heads were from our garden, harvested, and dried – for seeds to feed the birds, and for seeds to plant on the following year.

PLUS… they also gave the perfect subject matter for a lovely image!

This amazingly detailed image sits really well at a large size – 24″x24″ or larger. There is so much to look at and take in, and you will be discovering ‘new’ aspects of it for a long time.

Sunflowers!
Dried Sunflowers, Flat Lay
Sunflower detail
Sunflower detail
Sunflower detail

This is a ‘flat lay’ of sunflower heads, with the two large heads nestled in a shallow dish, supporting the other heads above them. All done on a white card background on the floor. Quite a balancing act. The camera was then attached to a boom above the sunflowers. It was shot in diffused sunlight: two medium size (4’x4′) white silks softening the sunlight, also with reflectors bouncing direct light back through the silks where needed to even the light spread.

Not a one-shot wonder! This is a what’s called an image focus stack. When photographing something closely, only a small portion of the subject is in sharp focus. So this is 10 photos taken with the focal point separated by about 2cm going from top of the sunflowers to the bottom. And then the photos are combined. It was photographed with a Sony A7M4 camera, with a 35 mm lens at f13, with 1/3 second exposures. The high f-stop is to give maximum depth of field without compromising sharpness too much.

The sunflowers during the photography. Balanced on white card, on the floor. A reflector to the left, a difffusion screen (out of shot) softening the hard sunlight on the right. It sounds simple. If only…

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