As the sunsets and the blue hour kicks in the light levels really drop off. Because of this a tripod is almost always required to shoot during this time. But the long shutter speeds gives an opportunity to show some motion blur.
Below, in Lightroom at full resolution I can read the menu.
During twilight, after sunset but before dark, all natural light is reflected light from the blue sky. Everything not light by man made light has a blue color cast.
And there is a short period where the exposure of the ambient light matches the exposure for man made lights. This is the opportunity to contrast the cool blue color of the natural light with the warm color of incandescent lights.
On the way home from Primitive Hall I saw this tree. The light was awfully harsh. But the loan green tree against a blue shy with white puffy clouds above a field for freshly mowed hay was just too much to pass up. So I pulled over, set the tripod up and waited a few minutes until the clouds got in just the right position.
Harsh light like this is flat because the shadows fall either directly behind or below the object. That absolutely kill any visual sense of texture. But this type of light is good for scenes that depend on color. And this image works mostly because of the great color.
If I shot people this is how I would want to do it—the eyes have it! And McCurry always captures big eyes.
Steve McCurry: A Retrospective from leica camera on Vimeo.
I know these are not “happy” images. I just think they could have done a better job selecting the music. But then, who am I to tell Steve McCurry what music to play with his images.
Here are three pictures from about the same physical position but all three are taken with different focal lengths (12mm, 24mm and 50mm) and, more importantly, three different camera positions relative to the top of the wheat (high, level, lower). The result—three very different images.
In these two, 12mm/high above and 24mm/level below, the horizon is placed almost dead center. Most of the time you are better off placing the horizon line along the upper third or along the lower third to emphasis either the foreground or the sky. But in this case there was nothing but blue sky above this band of clouds. So placing the horizon lower would have only added boring blue sky. And placing the horizon line higher would have added more emphasis to the wheat field. The wheat field is already quite colorful. And it lacks any variety in texture I didn’t think adding more of the field would add to the image. So that’s how the horizon got to be smack dab in the middle. 
Well this may not exactly be a wildflower. This the Asian variety that is found in many domestic spring gardens.
What makes this image for me the the backlighting. Backlighting has the potential to be the most dramatic of any direction of light. And with many flowers that are translucent backlighting will cause them to “glow”.
Rather than zooming in on a single sharp blossom I included two out of focus blossoms. I liked the bottom left to top right flow the three flowers provided.
A moderate aperture, f/5 provided sufficient depth of field to insure the one blossom was sharp all the way across; while the other two were thrown out of focus.
I wish the one flower sticking out on the top left of the sharp blossom was not there. Perhaps I could have hidden it had I had moved just a tad to my right.
I decided to crop this to a panorama and then decided to add the unusual white vignette. What do you think about those choices?
