If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!”
The Wizard Of Oz
Just an easy walk up from my small South Yorkshire town are acres of Oilseed Rape – just three weeks ago there was nothing but bare soil and a few straggly shoots but re-tracing my footsteps for a shot of the sunset one evening last week, I was overawed by the sight of them
iPhone at the ready I came again one blue sky afternoon – the farmer has left lots of tractor tracks to enable a walk through from field to field. Skylarks sang me through, the scent from the flowers was almost hypnotic and every now and then a pair of Partridge whirred into the air; their alarm bringing me to my senses.
The iPhone 6 took quite gritty looking images of mass textured colour which meant making do with closer views. However, such a vibrant colour is rather too brash in the midday sun so I made a note to re-visit with my Lumix G6 when the sun was less harsh one early evening.
yes, the light was more mellow, the sky was bland and the breeze made it difficult to take the close-up shots I was after with my 35mm lens. But here are some tips I found for next time on how to photograph vivid colours from SLR Photography Guide
You won’t photograph vivid colours unless you first have the exposure right.
yes nothing is ever as perfect as we want it to be but sometimes it almost is.
Hums by us with the honey of the Spring,
And showers of sweet notes from the larks on wing…”
~ Modern Love XI ~ George Meredith
Mixing Friday Flowers with Introspectives: thinking out loud with an aim to improve and learn more about photography. Hence the images are not always for show – feedback is welcome
PoetryPix 
Marvellous. Good as a pot of gold at the bottom of the garden, which actually links with the Wizard of Oz quote and a traditional Swahili tale which tells of gold coins pecked up by birds in a back yard, this after the owner of yard had wandered far and wide seeking his fortune but failed to do so.
thank you for the Swahili tale Tish – the lessons are the same the world over. I admit I did feel a bit like Dorothy walking though poppy fields:
“Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odour is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep,..” Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
Oh my goodness! I had never even heard of let alone looked at the saturation option in my camera. Just did so, and the difference in various settings is amazing. Thank you very much for pointing that out! Shame really that I am so disinterested in the technicalities of photography and my DSLR… Luckily I have you, Laura 🙂
Heartening to hear this post helped!
I am guilty too and hence these ‘introspective’ posts help me investigate a bit at a time. – I own up to being a shunner of the manual and doing the trial and error learning sort of like a lab rat!
What a blissful post, my dearest Laura. You’ve turned my day golden! 🙂
thank you Marina – and I hope your whole weekend is golden too
Ah, thank you… and yours! 🙂 xo
Rape seed fields are so lovely to look at but sadly they are the one flower which really gets up my nose, literally! Even driving past a field makes me sneeze! An interesting tip about saturation. I have never looked at that setting on my camera, I will now! (If I can find it).
sorry to hear that it gets up your nose! Bees love it and make very nice honey with it – maybe if you found some of that it might help desensitise you to the OSR pollen.
Hope you found the camera settings – I just found you in Spam – Aksimet is being hyper-vigilant and making too many mistakes!
Sigh… yes I have been sent to spam jail a lot this week. I have reported it to Akismet but they couldn’t understand why. Which is not very helpful. I shall try to look at the camera settings when I go downstairs. (If I don’t forget by then – again).
Oilseed Rape…referred to in haiku; yet, I struggle with the name of this beautiful flower. I think there needs to be app in which to reference photo tweaks…as I can’t seem to find the brain’s memory files. I set my Nikon to vivid without any exploration of color management. The learning of photography is never-ending…
OSR reminds me of wallflowers to look at and combines that scent with the whiff of its Brassica family! I find vivid on my camera can be too eye-popping so I tone it all down and then do post camera tweaks on the RAW (not in it!)
Yes that name. In German it acquires an s making Raps, which is less offensive. Or canola?
TBH I loath that whiff of mustard, and the colour is too intense and overwhelming for me.
i used to find the colour offensive stretching across our landscapes but have come to like it more and more – the Americans call it Canola.
Rape derives from the Latin word for turnip, rapa or rapum, cognate with the Greek word rhapys.
so beautiful!! thanks for the warmth Laura!
we need those warm colours today as here in S. Yorks the winds of change have brought a Nordic spell – what about you?
we have been getting warm sunshine for a few days but weather is always unpredictable on the west coast. Still spring is arriving in spite of the virus!! I like your Nordic spell! Keep well!
Just lovely Laura. On my laptop the iphone photos have a more impressionist view – perhaps Vincent might have painted this way (had he painted in Yorkshire, or had a smart phone)
thanks for the feedback Peter – I think Vince would have enjoyed the bitty bitmapping of the iphones but more so the ‘dehaze’ & ‘clarity’ sliders in Lightbox which magic up a soft and hazy impression!
p.s. this is surely his kind of yellow too!