One of my favorite books that my wife and I used to read to our boys when they were younger is Moo Moo Brown Cow, Have You Any Milk, the story of a kid who lives on a farm and gets a great deal of help from his animal friends before heading to bed. It’s a charming little tale, perfect for sending children off to sleep, and includes a few lines that, for whatever reason, have stuck with me over the years. Lines including:
Then we’ll dream the whole night through. Of flowers to sip, green grass to chew, a golden grain of wheat or two. The moon so high and sky so blue…
I don’t really know why, but something about the gentle rolling cadence of the lines in this book has always stuck with me, and I have always held it in quite high regard. The phrase “A golden grain of wheat or two” was on my mind when I took this photo, though to be honest I am not entirely certain that the grain in question actually is wheat. For an Oklahoman, formerly Minnesota, and before that, a Nebraskan, I know remarkably little about agriculture. Nevertheless, I do know a thing or two about what makes a compelling photograph :)
I have taken a few shots like this one over the years, and the challenge, I have learned, is to figure out how to compose the image so as to emphasize the subject. Lighting is key, of course, but how to make the subject stand out against the background is another matter entirely. For this image the answer presented itself in relatively quick fashion: use the bright colors of the surrounding garden to isolate the subject and, in the process, create a rich vibrant color palette that goes well beyond simple earth tones.
I took this image on a rainy day, our first in several weeks, in late October on the Oklahoma State University campus–the formal gardens, to be precise, just west of the Student Union. Our campus botanists and arborists had done up the place in elegant fashion as a way of welcoming the tens of thousands of visitors that would soon be descending on Stillwater for America’s Greatest Homecoming. In a brief reprieve from the light precipitation, I got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens to take advantage of the soaking flowers and overcast sky, which is one of my favorite lighting conditions to shoot in. Especially when it comes to photos of flowers and the like.
I shot this at f/9.5 to get a relatively shallow, but not too shallow, depth of field. I wanted the subject to be sharp while the background a beautiful blur, and that’s exactly what I was able to achieve. I did spend a few minutes angling myself such that the background colors were utilized to maximum effect and, on the whole, I think it worked save for the yellows in the top-right detracting just a bit too much from the wheat. (Or whatever it is.) I barely edited the image too, with just a slight crop on the top-right and a few basic color/exposure adjustments. In short, what you’re seeing here isn’t necessarily photographic brilliance but nature’s paintbrush, a scene created by God but captured, in a bit of mid-afternoon serendipity, by me. And it sure was fun.
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