Inspired #15

Seeing the colour possibilities within a scene.

Hello and welcome to Inspired, a weekly email for my paid subscribers. In this series I want to explore topics which I hope might spark some inspiration for your own photography. I will talk about my thought process for creating images, both in the field and in post processing. The posts will be linked in some way to the monthly challenges, hopefully giving you all lots of food for thought.

This week I have been trying to photograph the sprawling mounds of sea campion that have erupted all over my local beach here on the Suffolk Coast. The flowers are delicate and white and grow to about 10cm tall so they require a lot of time crawling around on the ground to get the right angle for an image. They are, however, beautiful and deserve to be photographed. I wanted to do them justice so decided to try some sunrise shots with the sun rising behind the flowers.

To do this I had to find a suitable composition that allowed the flowers to be the star of the image, focus stack the composition and balance the exposure to allow for the sun to be in the frame. All quite challenging when I was working against the clock and only had a few minutes when the sun was in the perfect position.

I was also mindful that I wanted to use some of my images for this week’s colour challenge article so I wanted to try and bring as much colour to my images as possible. The challenge for me was how to do this when I was essential working with a white subject.

So for this post I thought I would discuss this shoot, my thought process, the images I went on to make and how I managed to showcase all the lovely colours that were present on the beach.