Sunflowers and a Pirate Balloon

I went to the McKee-Besher Wildlife Management Area to photograph the annual sunflower fields. I did this last year and found I would lose track of where I set my bag, so this year I tied a balloon to it. The balloon happened to be a large pirate balloon (I gave it to a little kid when I was done), which got me many stares from other photographers in the area. One person came up to me and asked what the balloon was for; one I told him it was to mark my stuff, he was like that is a great idea never thought of that. The balloon also worked as a great piece of juxtaposition within the sunflower field. I got several nice shots of the field, not so many with the balloon since the breeze would make it dip down to low. However, what I would love to do; is do a portrait session in one of the fields. I think a nice earthy shoot, with big floppy hats and breezy dresses or the earth child/hippy look would be perfect out in the field. The other thing that would be fun would be to do a cosplay portrait session.

I photographed the field using both a 60mm macro lens and my trusty 18-200mm lens. I used a 200 ISO with an aperture set to 9.0f; I did go down to as low as 4.0f for some macro shots and as high as 22f for some long shots. I kept the shutter speed above 1/100 of second, due to the breeze, but was mostly faster than that. I did use a circular polarizer for a few shots as well as a graduated neutral density filter to compensate for the bright sky.
(Gallery)

Comments

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough. I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts. However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer. I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it. Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed. But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy. He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...

Cyber Blue

On October 11 th , I worked with Dayvon on a cyber concept shoot. This shoot was designed around a pair of contact lens with a circuit board pattern. This inspired me to think about things like “Blade Runner”, “Tron” and cyber punk in general. For this shoot I used: Canon 80D 2 Speed lights 2 Phottix strobes 2 Phottix Rectangular Softboxes with a grid 2 C-stands Blue gels Silver garage insulation Backdrop stand Black backdrop Connectable foam workout mats For this shoot I started out using four lights. The first two were small speed lights with blue gels attached placed on the floor aimed at the backdrop. The backdrop was silver garage insulation, which looks like silver bubble wrap. The backdrop reflected the blue light forward providing a bit of rim light. My main two lights were the strobes is rectangular soft boxes with grids attached. For this shoot I kept the lighting very low key, styled along that of a photo of Ryan Gosling i...

Return to the National Portrait Gallery

On February 28th, I attended the Costume & Camera (previously DC Cosplay Photoshoots) event at the National Portrait Gallery in DC. I have a love/hate relationship with shooting at the National Portrait Gallery; it is a beautiful location due to its architecture, especially on the third floor, and I’m thankful that you are allowed to do portrait photography there as long as you don’t use flash. What I get frustrated with is the varying colors of light throughout the building and the need to use natural or continuous light. (I’m a flash girly.) For this event, I used: Canon R6 24 - 105mm lens Neewer 12-inch LED light Assistant Camera Settings: This shoot was inside the Portrait Gallery, which has a no flash policy, thus I was using a mix of natural and continuous lighting, which affects settings. My ISO ranged from 100 ISO to 3200 ISO with the most common ISO being ISO 1000. My aperture stayed between F4 and F5, with the most c...

The Munchkin's Notebook

Search This Blog