Same Day, Same Idea

I didn't know it at the time, but I photographed the lupines on the same day as last year.

We don't see many lupines hereabouts, but there is a spot by a rural road that has a nice display. Off I set. I probably wouldn't have remembered but The Furry Gnome posted some recently. My memory usually requires reminders to jog it.

So . . . yesterday, June 11, I drove out to the spot. The sun was pretty high by the time I got around to it, so the photos are more contrasty that one would prefer, but one does one's best under the conditions. It was still fun to do, and the results are palatable. I did try and partly succeeded in playing down some of the high contrast in editing.

The trick with gardens that look great to the eye is to find a composition that works in a static photo. I am not sure if I managed to do that, but in the above photo, I isolated one flower. Below, there are plenty of blooms, but I tried to have the front and centre one stand out from the rest.

Next, I found a patch that had a bit of an arc to it. By opening the aperture, I was able to blur the farther flowers to draw the eyes to the nearer clump. The darker foreground and background help to frame the grouping.

There was a patch that was shaded by trees. I think you can see how different this ↓ photo looks than the others. I do like how all of the blooms in this grouping are of similar colour: all but the outlier to the bottom left. I did try cloning it out, but that left a fairly large blank space, so I decided to leave it in. I possibly could have cloned-in a flower similar to the others, but adding elements to a photo can sometimes seem like cheating.

Thanks for the red shirt suggestions (yesterdays post). I shall have to look more deeply.

Well, it is 6:15, so I must get myself ready to drive to the other house to take Danica to work. It will be my good deed for the day.