Timeless Sunflowers

Description

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!

Composition: 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.

This is 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 focus 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 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 detail in this image is amazing. It is really deserving of its large print size of 36″x36″