It’s poppy time of year in my garden. I can’t resist a poppy, they are among my favorite flowers to photograph. Ephemeral and architected to respond to even slight wind (so motion is always an issue at the slower shutter speeds often used for macro work), poppies are not the easiest flowers to photograph. Stunning colors and a kind of naive lack of pretension (decorative poppies are no hothouse roses bred for commerce) makes the effort worth it.

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With this Papaver rhoeas I intentionally underexposed to help me get a fast enough shutter speed to avoid the flower-in-motion problem. I shot at 1/800 of a second on a tripod with my 100mm macro lens fairly wide open at f/5.6 and ISO 200.

My idea was to get the center in focus, and to minimize the focus degradation across the rest of the flower by getting as parallel to the flower as possible.

Naturally, the histogram bunched to the left (I was underexposed by a couple of stops), but I was able to salvage this in the multi-RAW conversion process, with only a little extra noise.

Recent Papaver story: Salutation to the Sun; More poppies.