Daisies

I love blooming meadows in this season especially those of Alpine type glowing with yellows, pinks, violets, reds and whites. Our meadows were once fields for growing crops or pastures for cattle. Almost noone is growing own crop or breeding own cattle nowadays. It’s not economically efficient. So the past fields and pastures turned into meadows in past 20 years. Unfortunatelly such a meadows are not home for wide variety of meadow flowers. The most common ones are dandelions and common daisies (Bellis Perennis) which are simply everywehere. Less spread are oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum Vulgare), blue and white campanulas, poppies and cornflowers.

Common daisies, in our country called sevenbeauties, are very often photographed and I wanted to try it this year also. It’s beautiful how they turn their heads towards the sun as sunflowers and how their petals are bright white the first day of bloom and turning to pink at tips every other day.

~ Sevenbeauty ~
1/1600 sec. @ 100 mm, f/2.8, ISO 100

This photo is also first in my new series called simply “From meadows and fields” in which I would like to present various flowers blooming in our country on meadows and fields.

I see much more oxeye daisies everywhere this year comparing it to previous years and that’s good because they are beautiful flowers keeping their heads high in tall meadow grass. With not lawned meadows it’s quite tough to find pleasing composition with them though as they are often hidden deeply in grass so if you want to take photos of them you need to garden some unwanted stalls almost always. I really like oxeye daises and thus I had to photograph them this year also.

~ Daisy trio ~
1/1600 sec. @ 100 mm, f/2.8, ISO 100

I wanted more blossoms in frame and I was happy to separate these three. The colour version isn’t much pleasing though so I used a toning which results in much more pleasing image. Hope you like it.

This is all for today. One of next posts will be about poppies.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Technical information: all photographs in this post were taken with Canon EOS 450D camera and Canon EF 100mm USM macro lens, in natural conditions.

Common weed

I think that we all see dandelions as common weed which is not always easy to get rid of. On the other hand we all usually enjoy view on a meadow glowing with golden colour of thousands and thousands dandelions.

Last year I took some detailed photos of a dandelion which you can find in this post. Also this year I have decided to take some dandelion photos but this time I wanted to try shooting seed heads.

1/160 sec. @ 100 mm, f/4, ISO 100

I used “Aged photo” preset in Lightroom 3.4 and did only couple of additional tweaks.

1/400 sec. @ 100 mm, f/2.8, ISO 100

You can see a lot of dandelion photos nowadays on flickr and other photo related sites so I wanted to create something unseen and I think that I achieved it with this photo. At least I never saw anything similar. I used Lightroom’s “Creamtone”preset and did additional adjustments. I think it could look really nice on a big format.

I saw uncountable amount of dandelion photos with water dropplets so I wanted to try to have some mine, of course.

1/500 sec. @ 100 mm, f/4, ISO 100

This was taken one foggy morning after the fog has dissappeared and after sun had some time to dry everything soaked due to fog. I visualized this with strong contrast and still soft. I hope that I made it. Whole processing was done in Lightroom without using any preset this time.

I originally thought that I will use the same processing for all these photos making nice triptych but it did not work. Each photo asked for different processing and I think it’s much better this way. What do you think?

Thanks for visiting and enjoy summer!

Technical information: all photographies in this post were taken with Canon EOS 450D camera and Canon EF 100mm USM macro lens mounted to a tripod, in natural conditions, indoors.