Sunflower shoots - tiring attemps

Does it looks like a book cover or something? I do have the intention to publish some photography booklets, but not the time yet.

Photos in this post are some of the shots I did recently after discovered that there are sunflowers growing in Hokkaido University campus.

It took me three visits to make the shots...

The 1st visit was because of I woke up at 5.30 am early morning and found nothing else to do, so I decided to go shooting. I arrive at the farm at about 6.00 am and shoot for about 2 hours.
Just when I am very happy with the shots, I realized that the picture size in the camera have been set to small. This means the photos have not much use for me beside displaying on the computer. Trust me, nothing is more frustrating than this for a photographer (be him amateur or pro)!

So I check up the yahoo website for weather forecast and confirmed that the sky will be sunny the next morning and revisited the location for second shoot. After arrived to the spot, I found the yahoo forecast being quite accurate, it was sunny... but unfortunately, it was a strong windy sunny morning. That means the sunflowers are waving, dancing in the wind, instead of standing still smiling at you ready for photographing. This is what yield the 3rd visit and luckily some good sunflower shots are made :)

The colour of following shot is directly out of my camera without touching up in photoshop. See how blue the sky is and how the sunflower 'pop'. The trick is simple, use a polarize filter; as have been mentioned in my previous post.




The next photo was a composed of 2 shots using photoshop. I found that I love the foreground flower very much, but then the background was a white building, apartment or something. During the shoot, I didn't notice the building was there, as everything behind was totally off focus. However, after watching via my computer screen, I found it to be really spoiling for the whole scene;

Sunflower + Building = ?

See, it is mathematically incorrect as all components in a single equation should be homogeneous in dimensions. So I replaced the building with some sunflower and using Gaussian Blur to make it off focus. The result is this one of my favorite desktop background:

BTW, after seeing the equation thing, guess now you know why tech geek made a good photographer ya?!!