Easter blaze of wildflowers

David_Senesac · Apr 17, 2008

I exposed this 4x5 transparency sheet of Provia 100F with my 150mm Nikkor lens on Holy Thursdays March 20, the Easter week, in the San Jacinto River basin hills of Riverside County. I have been a landscape photographer nearly three decades and during many good years visit the fabulous Southern California spring wildflower areas. And this scene was part of the most impressive few acres of wildflowers I have ever beheld. Interestingly the other most impressive scene I've seen was on Easter Eve in 2003.

Here I wanted to capture the most impressively brilliant blaze of color within the field. I anchored the frame by putting a particularly bright patch of coreopsis a bit below frame center while allowing the impressive poppies the whole upper area. This was about 11:30am in calm air with the sun within clear blue skies somewhat off-axis backlit off to the left. For those unfamiliar with poppies, they open up about 10am and close 3pm so one can only shoot midday. This was a modest gradient slope in a somewhat oblique direction that my view camera movements with a bit of tilt and swing easily put the whole even plane into critical sharp focus. In this section California poppy, eschscholtzia californica, dominate. Other species include light violet hued birds-eye gilia, gilia tricolor, white hued popcorn flower, plagiobothrys nothofolvus, dull orange hued fiddleneck, amsinkia intermedia, small blue hued miniature lupine, lupinus bicolor, yellow hued California coreopsis, coreopsis californica, small yellow hued goldfields, lasthenia californica, dark purple hued chia, salvia columbariae, lavender hued tansy-leaf phacelia phacelia tanacetifolia, blue hued baby blue-eyes, nemophila menziesii, and purple hued canterbury bells, phacelia campanularia.

My digital light meter read EV15.4 incident perpendicular to the sun, so I targeted EV14.8 with 1/8 second f/61 that came out dead on. Crude flatbed scan, processed to closely match slide colors.

The below image is a crude flatbed scans of 9% frame width crops of the above transparency at a top and a bottom location of the frame that shows what detail a 38 inch tall large print will offer. After a future drum scan, significantly more fine detail will show that the cheap flatbed scan cannot bring out.

To read more about my wildflower landscape work during this spring of 2008, on my below homepage, at top right, select the "Spring 2008 Wildflower Trip Chronicles" feature. Page 7 and 8 covers the period where this image was made.