Poppy house
- 📍 Location: Champagne, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
An entire field had gone over to poppies, and on the far edge of it, very small, sat a single farm building. Red across the bottom, green across the middle, grey above: the picture is three flat bands and one object.
I used a long lens from the roadside, which compresses the poppies into an unbroken red mass instead of the scattered flowers they actually are. Standing in the field and shooting wide would have been more truthful about the density and far less true about the impression.
The house is kept tiny on purpose, sitting right on the horizon line just left of centre. It is the only thing in the frame with a straight edge, and that is enough to make it the subject of a picture in which it occupies perhaps one percent of the area.
Fields like this appear without warning and are gone in a fortnight, and they are never where you remember them being the year before. I drove past this one, braked, reversed, and worked for twenty minutes. Most of the good pictures I have of Champagne were made that way.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
