Big flower up closey-pie

Another big flower -- trying out the comp. Nope!

Sick sunset light -- but some of those flowers are turned the wrong way!

The sunflower field. Low flowers, tall flowers, and lots of empty space :( Not good for doing my "field of flowers" shot

Chalk Full of Smiles

Starburst version

Face Full of Sunshine

“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” -Roald Dahl I’ve always loved sunflowers, ever since I was a kid, and photographing them was towards the top of my list. Last year was filled with beautiful sunflower plants but no sunsets to go with them. This year, despite a severe drought in CA, we’ve had a whole slew of nice sunsets. A week earlier I witnessed a stunning sunset at a different, slightly less alive, sunflower patch. I had visited this field a few weeks earlier and arrived to find no sunflowers — we were a few weeks early! Hoping that the sunflowers would be in their prime, Willie and I found the sunflowers exactly as we had hoped — alive, perky, and lookin’ good! The hardest part? ... deciding which patch of flowers we wanted to shoot! When we arrived the clouds looked fairly thin to the west but sure enough, just as the sun began to set, the clouds (and Ryan Engstrom) showed up! I loved how the orange sky mimicked the yellow sunflowers. This patch of flowers also had little yellow “noses”, which I thought made the flowers look like smiling faces! What do you see when you look at the sunflowers? Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 18mm, f/9, 1/25 sec, ISO 500

Another attempt at the field of flowers

I kinda like the wave of flowers here but it wasn't really what i wanted with my field of flowers shot