Well hello everyone!  I hope you’re having a good start to the week.

One subject I really enjoy photographing is flowers, as you’ve likely noticed if you’ve followed along with this blog for any amount of time.  When you get up close to blooms, it just seems that there are so many tiny details that are interesting, which play into the larger beauty of the entire flower.  That’s what personally draws me to them as subjects.  I have traditionally shot flowers in macro (meaning getting up super close, almost the way you’d see them with a magnifying glass), but this year I found myself doing a lot of experimenting, just to see what else I could come up with.  This week’s images and next week’s you could still loosely be called macro, but rather than the flower taking up the entire frame, I wanted to back up a little to give the viewer a sense of where these flowers live.  In this case, it happens to be in a field here at my house.  In both cases I used the setting sun to add some dramatic lighting to either accentuate the details of the flowers (like image above), or to separate the flower from its background (the image below).  Both examples come away with very different feels, in my opinion, despite being similar subjects, which is again something I love about taking pictures of flowers – it seems there’s an endless supply of compositions and “looks”.

See you next week! 

–Dan Thompson