Summer Sunflowers 17

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Nikon 24-120mm f4, Nikon 35mm f1.8, Nikon 70-300mm, Zeikos Extension Tubes, SB-700 Speedlight, VanGuard Abeo Plus 363CT tripod, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

The sunflower plot at Bays Branch was full of big headed sunflowers which was a great opportunity to capture the large flower on two different trips. I wish I would of gone sooner to the plot has the sunflowers on the second trip were very much past their prime. The first trip was pretty close to having them look their best.

I carried in my camera bag loaded with the above equipment and used the different lense combo’s to get the perspective of the sunflower I was looking for. With my tripod set up, I always turned off VR and AF and used LiveView to focus on the sunflower. Aperture ranged from f11 to f16 and ISO from 100-200. Both matrix and center weighted exposure metering was used along with adjustments to the exposure compensation. If I wanted a darker background, I turned down the exposure compensation and used the SB-700 flash to expose the head of the sunflower. I used either Manual or TTL on the speedlight.

Using Lightroom CC to adjust these images, I first adjusted the white balance followed by adjustments to the other common sliders. Once I had one of the images looking great, I created a preset to help speed up the processing of the other images. I used the radial filter to further improve the look of the sunflower head while leaving the background unadjusted.

In Photoshop CC, I first had to clone out a number of dust spots from a dirty lense and also a spot that is on the sensor of my D750 (Side Note: Will be sending the D750 in for a recall because of shutter issues that Nikon released a month ago. I haven’t had any issues with my body but figure it would be a good time to have the sensor cleaned as well. Now I just got to figure out the best time to not have my camera). I then sharpened the images using the high pass filter and adjusting the blend mode to overlay and opacity down to 15%. To speed up the sharpening step, I created an action in PS that will automatically do the steps needed to sharpen the image all by pressing the F12 button.

Hopefully next year I’ll be able to capture the sunflowers at their peak and also use the Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 G2 lense that I’m now using on the D750. 

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