A couple of weeks ago I had a rather delayed report from my daughter that she was driving past several fields of purple flowers to and from her workplace. A quick search on google maps and we put a pin in the location and after a phone call to Dave to see if he was available, we arranged to meet up and head over for a gander. My original thought from her description was lavender fields which got me very excited! However, after a chat to Dave he informed me it was far more likely to be Lacey Phacelia, a purple flowering plant used in green composting methods and this was in fact what it turned out to be.

We decided to do a sunset shoot and arrived a couple of hours before the big ‘ole boy was going to disappear for its nightly sulk. There were quite a few clouds in the sky and things looked likely to colour up quite nicely! A small group of trees was nestled in the crook of the shallow valley of the fields and I decided to make them centrepiece of the composition for my first attempt. After wandering up the edge of the field, constanly battling bees and other insects that have no idea of the concept of personal space I found spot I was happy with for my first image.

This was the best of the light sadly as a large bank of cloud soon rolled in. I hung around in this spot for a while but eventually admitted defeat and headed back to the car. But as often happens, a small break in the clouds right as we were about to leave teased us back to get one final hurrah!

I was relatively happy with my first efforts but knew that better light would be needed to get a true “banger” from this location. A couple of days later I headed out again after work and upon arrival it looked like it was going to be a good one. But once again a large bank of cloud rolled in and ruined the session. although it was nice to reaquaint myself with the bees!

I decided to make one last effort and headed out again a couple fo nights later, meeting up with Jack Lodge for a quick catch up before we headed off in different directions to hopefully get some top notch images.

I decided to stick with the spot I knew worked for me and this time I had better light, but not as much clouds. We are never happy are we!

I love how the light turns the flowers more purple in this image compared to the others.

The different light hitting the slopes of the field gave me the sense of depth I was after in the image. Also the light did wonders to the colour of the flowers. making them even more purple with that yellow glow washing over them. Once again this demonstrates the importance of golden hour in landscape photography to add that dream like colour palette to your images. Jack rang me at this point and sent me an image from the back of his camera that made my jaw drop. The lad does know how to find an outstanding composition! Check out his Instagram profile to have a look at his effort, its a doozy.

So in all, 3 trips out to this now famous field of Phacelia and I came away pretty happy with my images. Once again the local photographers have all been to visit just like the poppy fields that were nearby last year. I love that so many people got to enjoy the beauty of the scene and that the vast majority of folks respected the crop and stayed on the edges. I did see one image of a bus load of Japanese tourists who just wandered into the field, taking selfies and group photos among the flowers and this is not okay in my book. On a side note I would like to compliment the farmer on his photogenic crops as in the past few years he has also planted poppies and seinfoin in his fields, both also very pretty flowers in numbers! In fact there was a Seinfoin field a bit further along from this one but access looked tricky and I didn’t want to cause any damage so left it alone in the end.

I think we will start to see more and more fields like this in the coming years as farmers move away from chemicals and revert to more natural ways to restore nitrogen back into their fields. I for one, cant wait to see more!

Thats it for this week folks

Toodles

Fields of…..purple??

Blog

Fields of…..purple??

What influences my photography style?

Blog