Yellow contrast
- 📍 Location: Quinson, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
Three sunflower heads at the front of the frame, turned the same way, with the rest of the field falling away behind them and a clean blue sky above with a few flat white clouds. Yellow against blue, and nothing else asked to do any work.
I framed low and close so the nearest heads are almost life size and the field compresses behind them into a continuous yellow mass. A step back and the picture becomes an agricultural landscape; from here it stays a portrait of three flowers with a crowd behind them.
The light was overhead and hard, which is normally the worst possible conditions. For this subject it is the right one: sunflowers are thick and sculptural, they take direct sun without washing out, and only harsh light gives that saturation to the blue.
An entire field of flowers that all face the same direction is a genuinely strange thing to stand in. I photographed them from in front, the way you would photograph a group of people, because that is more or less what it feels like.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
