Circus and daisies
- 📍 Location: Camp des Fourches, Alpes-Maritimes, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
At this altitude the summer is a few weeks long and the flowers take it without hesitation. A clump of purple mountain blooms had pushed up between two grey boulders, and I built the frame around them: the flowers close and low in the foreground, the cirque rising behind, the sun cresting the ridge.
Vertical again, and for the same reason as always: I wanted the eye to start in the grass and climb. A wide lens placed a hand’s width from the petals exaggerates that climb; the flowers become the scale of a person while the peaks stay honestly distant.
Shooting into the sun as it clears a ridge gives you one narrow moment when the star is clean and the slope below is still lit rather than blown out. I bracketed through it and kept the frame where the grass still had colour in the shade, because a black foreground would have cost me the flowers.
Camp des Fourches is an abandoned military post on a high pass, all ruined barracks and stones. That so much colour comes back to it every July, entirely uninterested in what used to be there, is the thing I keep returning to photograph.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
