View From The Roadside

Borage Sky
Originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

Summer, with it’s long days of harsh, high sun (or rain) isn’t usually the busiest of times for my photography. I much prefer the winter, when the sun stays low in the sky most of the day, casting lovely golden light on everything, rather than casting the harsh shadows of the summer sun.
Fields of flowers, though, are one of those subjects that actually look better in the summer sun, which given that fields of flowers grow in the summer is a good thing really.
While half the county seems to be turning a golden yellow as the barely matures, some local farmers have diversified into the pharmaceutical industry. The flowers turning this field purple are called Borage or Starflower, whose oil can be used to treat hormonal related complaints. This picture is just a slice of a huge field of it, which makes for quite a sight.

I recently bought some Hi-Tech ND Graduated filters designed to be used to balance the exposure on the sky to prevent it being washed out due to the need to expose the ground properly. They work far better than the Cokin ones I had, but hadn’t been using much. In some of these borage shots I fell into a trap caused by using both the filter and a circular polariser on a wide angle lens, and turning bits of what should be blue sky into a darker shade altogether. Now I’ve seen it I’ll know to watch for it in future.

Probably the most common flower grown for medicinal purposes around Hampshire is the Poppy. Fields of both red and white poppies can be seen dotted about the county in or around June. These fields of white poppies were near Ashley (the same field in this picture).

Ashley Poppies 2
Originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

I spent a couple of hours here taking pictures from various different angles in between the gusts of wind. So many white poppies blowing about in the wind was magical, though looking back I can’t help wonder how much of that magic might have come from the effects of the plants in was standing amongst!
I’m not entirely happy with the pictures though. The sharp foreground and blurry backdrop technique that works in this shot, doesn’t work quite so well in the other shots. Looking at them now I would have preferred to have a shot with both the foreground and at least the middle background in more focus. It’s a lesson learned for the next time.

The next crop to turn an interesting colour is the barely, a lovely deep gold. I’m not sure I’ll get too much of a chance to take any pictures before it’s all harvested though, between softball and looking for a flat to buy. The nice thing with buying a flat will be the extra wall space it’ll give me to hang some prints of my pictures. With nowhere to hang them, I haven’t worried too much about printing these pictures, and can’t help but feel I’m perhaps missing a part of the whole photographic experience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 10:41 pm and is filed under About Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.