The Lavender Infusion
A solo red poppy blooms in the middle of the Lavender fields of the Valensole plateau in Provence. I caught the TGV from Paris following a busy week of meetings to enjoy an afternoon and evening in the Lavender fields of southern France before flying home the next day. It was a tiny bit early, but I'm glad I took the chance because there were several fields that had bloomed enough to give a good sense of that beautiful purple color. The ideal time is probably last few days of June and first few days of July. However, the crowds must be pretty tedious at that time. There were certainly a few flower peepers out there already, but the hordes had not yet descended en masse. Couple that with the extreme heat that most of Europe is now experiencing and I'm quite happy to have been there when I did. It is such a beautiful area, and of course the Lavender fields have been popularized to such a high degree over the years that all the photos start to look the same. I tried to find some different comps, but sadly none played out as well as the tried-and-true.
PS. Some behind-the-scenes notes. I would have liked to bring the poppies a little bit more front and center but there's like a dozen people to my right just out of frame here, I couldn't move closer without getting in front of them (or behind them). I also used f20 aperture because I was shooting with telephoto and I wanted to get as much as possible in focus. I wouldn't normally do that and I had been trying to shoot different focus points at lower f-stop to do some focus stacking, but by this time I was rapidly running out of light and color and there were too many people walking around so I had to shoot quickly. Not ideal, but I don't think it worked out too badly.
On the editing side, there were some damned telephone wires going right behind that tree which I felt compelled to clone/heal out. It is a tedious process in Lightroom as LRs clone tool is not nearly as intelligent at blending as Photoshop. I should've used PS but I need to reinstall it, and I didn't feel like waiting and I thought it'd be easier to do in LR than it turned out to be. Finally, I took this image using Pentax's Pixel Shift, which Adobe only recently added support for in LR. I used to edit by bringing the pixel shift file into Raw Therapee to process and then move to LR. LR's pixel shift processing is not as good, so there are still some artifacts left here from moving leaves, etc. if you peep real close. I plan to run it back through RT and PS to do it right one of these days. This issue would affect Sony, Panasonic and other pixel shift implementations as well.
The Lavender Infusion
A solo red poppy blooms in the middle of the Lavender fields of the Valensole plateau in Provence. I caught the TGV from Paris following a busy week of meetings to enjoy an afternoon and evening in the Lavender fields of southern France before flying home the next day. It was a tiny bit early, but I'm glad I took the chance because there were several fields that had bloomed enough to give a good sense of that beautiful purple color. The ideal time is probably last few days of June and first few days of July. However, the crowds must be pretty tedious at that time. There were certainly a few flower peepers out there already, but the hordes had not yet descended en masse. Couple that with the extreme heat that most of Europe is now experiencing and I'm quite happy to have been there when I did. It is such a beautiful area, and of course the Lavender fields have been popularized to such a high degree over the years that all the photos start to look the same. I tried to find some different comps, but sadly none played out as well as the tried-and-true.
PS. Some behind-the-scenes notes. I would have liked to bring the poppies a little bit more front and center but there's like a dozen people to my right just out of frame here, I couldn't move closer without getting in front of them (or behind them). I also used f20 aperture because I was shooting with telephoto and I wanted to get as much as possible in focus. I wouldn't normally do that and I had been trying to shoot different focus points at lower f-stop to do some focus stacking, but by this time I was rapidly running out of light and color and there were too many people walking around so I had to shoot quickly. Not ideal, but I don't think it worked out too badly.
On the editing side, there were some damned telephone wires going right behind that tree which I felt compelled to clone/heal out. It is a tedious process in Lightroom as LRs clone tool is not nearly as intelligent at blending as Photoshop. I should've used PS but I need to reinstall it, and I didn't feel like waiting and I thought it'd be easier to do in LR than it turned out to be. Finally, I took this image using Pentax's Pixel Shift, which Adobe only recently added support for in LR. I used to edit by bringing the pixel shift file into Raw Therapee to process and then move to LR. LR's pixel shift processing is not as good, so there are still some artifacts left here from moving leaves, etc. if you peep real close. I plan to run it back through RT and PS to do it right one of these days. This issue would affect Sony, Panasonic and other pixel shift implementations as well.