For the last few years, the Durfee farm has grown a sunflowers in a small roadside field and each year they have wilted before I had a chance to get out to photograph them, but not this year.
This year, I woke up early on a Sunday morning and made the very, very quick drive to the farm with the camera and an assortment of lenses, eager to capture a beautiful scene. I had the 20, 35, 50 and 120mm FF equivalent lenses with me and I was ready to create something to put on my wall.
Yeah, well … that didn’t happen. The 20mm was too wide for a field so small and there was no way to fill the entire frame with sunflowers. The same challenge presented to the 35mm, but while there were a few spaces that I could eliminate distant distractions, it was impossible for me to find a way to compose 10+ sunflowers in a balance and appealing composition. The 50mm was too narrow for an expansive image, so could really only succeed in creating an environmental portrait of a flower.
So that left me with the 120mm macro to take pictures of flies and bees on the the flowers. Initially, I struggled to get the AF to work well. I tried S-AF but the little creatures were moving to fast. I tried C-AF, but the EM5ii performs poorly. It then occurred to me (much later than it should have), that I bump the ISO, use a faster shutter speed, manually focus and then move the camera into focus while deploying the high-speed sequential shutter. So that is why I did to much greater success. And while I HATE culling images, I came away with far more successful captures than I would have had I stubbornly insisted that I continue to compose, frame, and focus for single/isolated captures as I had been.
So a pretty and well composed image of a field of sunflowers remains a target that I have yet to check off my list.
Maybe next year.