I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a tradition per se, but every Spring when these prairie fire flowers bloom around town I relish the opportunity to capture their beauty with my camera. Often these shots end up on Weekly Fifty, and longtime readers will no doubt have seen similar scenes as this one shared here on the blog, but my enjoyment at taking shots like this is in no way lessened by the frequency, or perhaps regularity, with which I take them. To this day my favorite flower photo I have ever taken is that of a monarch butterfly resting on one of these prairie fires just as the sun is coming up on the morning after a nice spring rain. I’m still not sure how I was able to get that, but in a lot of ways I have been chasing it ever since.
This one is not it :) But it is, nonetheless, still a fun type of image to create and one that I continue to learn from as I grow in my photography journey. I shot this in my neighbor Dave’s field, with his permission of course, one evening while the sun was slowly descending in the western sky. I had really hoped to go capture a shot in the morning after a rainstorm, but the one thing you really need for that to happen is, as you might have guessed, rain. And that has been, sadly, in short supply in Oklahoma lately. As you can see from the withered petals on the stalk, this flower and its peers were not going to be around for too terribly much longer so, rain or no, I knew my time was limited. And let’s be honest, these flowers are beautiful no matter what the weather conditions happen to be.
I shot this with my D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens at f/16 and positioned fairly close to the subject. I couldn’t go much wider than f/16 since I wanted as much of the flower to be in focus as possible, but one thing I could easily control was the overall composition–specifically the horizon. Did I want to show just the field, or the line of trees behind it? I took dozens of images from low, medium, and high angles and ended up preferring this one over the rest because it shows more of a sense of place and scale. You get the idea that this flower is in the middle of a large field, and that there’s something (trees? bushes?) off in the distance; the other shots without that dark green line just weren’t as interesting to look at. I also positioned myself such that the sunlight was coming from behind the subject which added a nice glow to the topmost petals.
Who knows…maybe we’ll get some rain and I’ll get to go out again and take some photos, but even if not I’m happy with what I got. And that’s a lot :)
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