A summer night trip to a sunflower field was on offer which sounded very attractive.
I’m not going to name the location for two reasons; firstly, the owner of the field gave permission and secondly, it doesn’t feel right to advertise it.
Reccé
We rocked up to the location early evening to find we had it all to ourselves which was a real treat.
The weather was bright but cloudy and pretty good for what we had in mind.
I had brought three devices with which to capture images; my usual camera with 24-120 lens, my camera I had just had converted to infrared (and on it the best lens in my collection for infrared – my ultra wide 14-30mm), and my drone.
On arrival we did a reccé walk round first and really liked the shape of the tree at the back of the field so once the exploration was finished we set to work.
The Shoot
A straight shot of a sunflower and the tree was grabbed at pace.
Then I started doing some ICM shots.
In post, I really liked the one below which went up on the Ol’ Insta.
We were both keen to try out our Infrared cameras so started shooting with those.
I had my camera in Mono display mode to at least show a close interpretation of the IR output and early thoughts were I really liked what I was seeing.
With lots of green in the image and a moody cloud sky, the shots looked like they had a lot of potential. I wanted to get some decent compositions though.
I was moving around and shooting at standing and crouching down heights.
Below is the image I really liked having stumbled through an edit by following an online tutorial.
This was mainly installing and applying a IR white balance / temperature profile (-50 and -100 ones were offered up via this website).
I then took the image into Photoshop and alternated the blue and red channels using a channel mixer adjustment layer.
I then added a saturation/hue adjustment layer to play around with the colours. I can’t remember now if I did this in PS or back in Lightroom but in the latter you can use the dropper to change the colour range and play around.
I felt a blueish sky and a some element of yellow was in order, the latter to at least tip a nod to the sunflower season.
The end product I loved but I have to confess it was mostly fumbling around and experimenting in post-production!
As the evening was closing in on us, I thought I may as well get the drone up as there was a shot I was after which was impossible without trampling and flattening the sunflowers to get to the spot for the composition I wanted.
I had a good fly around and grabbed some really nice aerial shots of the field and their shapes. To your potential annoyance as a reader, I will keep these to myself to protect the identity and location of the farm.
Here is the shot which is just what I was after.
And that was a wrap.
We packed up and agreed it had been an awesome evening.
We were like kids in a sweet shop and we’d hit lucky with the access, the pleasing tree as background subject, the clouds and sunset.
As I’ve found out so many times, you need to go out, and go out again.
This social photography shenanigans really does deliver.
I’m also a big fan of infrared but realise I hit lucky on my first go at it, the right subject, the right colours, the right light, and a lucky edit not really being 100% sure what the hell I am doing!
To that end, a have ordered a book and video course to learn in more details which will hopefully help me get better at it, or more consistent moving forwards.
Onwards and upwards…