Ive always loved sunflowers. I can even remember all the way back to a warm summer morning at pre-school when I made one of the teachers pick me up so I could try to harvest some of the seeds from the flowers near the playground. While playing baseball eating flavored sunflower seeds was the cool thing to do especially if you sat on the bench most of the time 😉
When Willie called Alan and I up and said clouds look good, lets go shoot sunflowers I immediately said yes. We hopped in the car, drove 45 minutes to a sunflower field, pulled over and looked around. No sunflowers We were a few weeks too early. Lots of stalks but no yellow flowers. The sky still looked juicy and we didnt want to give up and call it a quits so we raced to back to the Bay Area and made our way to Alviso.
With not much time before sunset we quickly ran out to the old wooden pylons next to the train tracks. I knew I wanted a reflection in the bay but the water was quite choppy. Luckily the Lee Big Stopper slowed the shutter down to about a minute and left the water looking glassy smooth. It pays to have a backup plan when things dont always go your way 🙂
Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S:
24mm, f/10, 64 sec, ISO 100