Photographing sunflowers in Colorado is interesting. It’s a game of hide and go seek every year as the farmers will plant them in different fields from year to year. And then once you do find them, so has everyone else in Colorado. Thankfully this year I was able to find some fields that had easy access and not a lot of foot traffic.
I also have the added benefit of living on the eastern plains, which is where most of the major sunflower fields are located. Here are some samples of what I was able to capture.
I captured this image as part of a time lapse. I like the angle of the sun on the horizon, the clouds in the sky for a bit of detail, and that the sunflowers are not fully in focus. I turned up the f-stop to ensure I got the sunburst affect.
I captured this image when scouting sunflower fields. I turned down the f-stop as I wanted a shallow depth of field to capture a single sunflower in focus. I also muted the surrounding colors in post processing to focus on yellow of the flower itself.
I counted and I think there are 14,000,605 sunflowers (Marvel fans should get that reference) in this image. The shear amount of sunflowers captured, even now when I look at it, it looks Photoshopped. I was at this location trying to capture sunrise, but as you can see there was heavy cloud cover. I took the opportunity of the soft light to capture the sunflowers in various compositions.
Capturing sunflowers can be seen as one of those “I’ve already done that” type scenarios for photographers. When given the opportunity to capture sunflowers I try to challenge myself buy forcing myself to capture them differently each time. Sunset, sunrise, shallow depth, macro, etc. Change it up each time to work on a new skill.
Hope you enjoyed.
Brad
