06/29/2024
June 21, 2024 along the Sunflower Festival & Trail in Gilliam, LA.
The following weekend after the festival, Melody and I went back out near sunset to try to incorporate the sun into the sunflower pictures, and I had some ideas I wanted to try for possible submissions to the photography contest. In general, I wanted to try to approach this trip with more of an artistic eye than just "take pretty pictures."
Melody has also recently gotten more into photography and got her first camera earlier this year. It's fun to have my best friend, partner, and wife with me doing this, and I really enjoy seeing how her stuff turns out because we both definitely have a different eye and approach.
In post editing, I enjoy playing with color balance and saturation on different tones, so I enjoyed taking out some of the color on a couple of these and leaving mostly just the coloring in sunflowers and the sun itself. I really wish I had my focus right in the shot with the bee about to land on the flower, but I had just moved my camera and tripod to this spot and was working on getting my focus right when I happened on that one. Blurry or not, I wanted to include it here.
The last two pictures are the ones I'll be submitting for the contest, which is why I more aggressively watermarked than I normally do, and are representative of the ideas I had coming out this time that I wanted to try to capture. These required minimal editing, mostly just bringing up some of the darker tones.
On the one without the sphere, I love how the stuff floating in the air was captures and the edges of the leaves and such were highlighted. This is probably one of my favorite pictures I've taken.
The glass sphere picture I thought was an interesting approach and the only thing I wish had turned out different with that one would have been seeing the sun in the sphere itself along with being able to see it just outside of it, but overall I'm happy with how this turned out, especially the bokeh effect and how some of the glare of the sun is crossing over the sphere. Worth noting that image is upside down in the sphere, so I flipped the image where that part is right side up, so the background behind it is actually upside down in the final version.
Taken with a Canon EOS Rebel T7i, the close up shots with the sunflower and the grain bin in the background with Rokinon FE14M-C 14mm wide angle lens, the blurry sunset shots with a Canon EF-S 55-250mm lens, and the glass sphere shots with a Canon EF 100mm Macro lens.
