It was another enjoyable sunflower season at Burnside Farms! Beautiful glowing sunsets, red and pink twilight clouds, an expansive sky of scattered golden clouds, and some really dramatic storm clouds. Below are my favorite images for this year’s Summer of Sunflowers:
Tips for Sunflower Sunsets:
- Composition is important when selecting where to set up your tripod. Pick a spot where the flowers are evenly spaced out in the frame across the foreground. Flowers in the immediate foreground should be interesting and well formed. Large gaps between flowers can be distracting to the flow of your scene. Most sunflower heads should be facing the camera and not overly drooping. However, having a few that are drooping in the frame can add some variety and interest to the image.
- If you want to create an immersive view of a vast field of flowers, elevate your camera above the foreground to ensure you can see the receding rows of flowers leading all the way to the background.
- Focus stacking a series of images will ensure that all the flowers are sharp from front to back. I usually take a series of three images: one focused on the front flowers, one focused about a third of the way back in the flowers, and one focused on the background that is exposed for the lighting in the sky. I manually blend these images as layers with masks into a single final image.
- Whenever possible, capture the drama of sunset or twilight colors and lighting and their effects on the clouds in the sky.
- Setting an aperture to f16 or smaller when shooting the background will usually add some pleasing diffractive rays to the setting sun.