Unexpected Wildflowers

I went hiking out at the wildlife refuge and I wasn’t expecting much besides a nice hike. It’s too early in the year for the long grasses to take on their golden color which looks so nice in the afternoon sun and I figured that the wildflowers had all come and gone. So, to keep it light I only brought with me my little Nikon Z50 hiking camera and the basic lenses. I can get pretty good photos with this camera but it really isn’t up to the level of my better (and heavier) camera gear. Much to my surprise and delight, there were many wildflower in full bloom along the trails and as the sun was hanging low in the sky, the flowers really looked nice in the golden hour light.

I took the photo below on the main trail that heads up the ridge and leads to the longer Indiangrass trail in the back of the refuge. There were dozens of yellow and purple wildflowers along the trail and I sought a flower that was receiving sunlight while those in its background were in shade. This allows me to have a bright in-focus flower with blurred colorful flower shapes in the background. As I said, this was my hiking camera and light-weight lens and it only goes down to an aperture of f/5.6. If I had used my better, wider aperture lens, I could really have blurred out the background flowers. I did take the image below into Photoshop, mask out the flower and add some blur but I didn’t want to overdo it.

Moving to the back of the refuge you find the Indiangrass trail, which runs down a hillside and across a valley where it heads back up the other side. Along this trail across the hillside were thousands of purple wildflowers. When I saw this, I knew I had my work cut out for me. Below is a close-up of some flowers with the low-hanging sun in the background. This is not an HDR merge of multiple images, but just a single hand-held exposure. I basically stopped all the way down to f/20 to get some burst from the sun and set the exposure compensation down to about -2.0EV to try to keep some color in the sunlight. Not bad, and it shows you how much range is in the Z50 sensor. You do get a little bit of discolored flare on the right side of the image just below the sun though (this is the cheap kit lens).

Up the trail, I became kind of obsesses with trying to get the flowers and trail heading off into the distance with the light almost directly behind me. My shadow is just to the left of frame and was difficult to shoot around. I experimented with trying to find the right height for the camera so that the flowers would look dense, but you could still see some trail. I liked the image below best and it is taken with me crouching so that the camera is about 3 feet off the ground. This is my favorite photo of the outing, I think.

Here is another perspective with the camera higher off the ground. I think that the flowers get minimized in this photo though you can see more of the trail in the distance. In both photos the light is very warm, which is why many people like to shoot during the golden hour just before sunset.

Below is a burned out tree stump among the wildflowers with another in the distance. I’m not sure that the distant tree stump reads very well as it gets a bit swallowed up by the grass.

And last, a cactus shot that I can never resist taking (attempting). This is shot directly into the setting sun, which is just out of frame above. With this perspective, the cactus spines and wildflowers glow, but the sunlight on the lens tends to fade the colors from the image. In Lightroom, I selected for the highlights and warmed and saturated the colors to make it look more like what I saw. I think it is a nice detail shot.

Not bad for the lightweight hiking camera. Thanks for reading.

41 thoughts on “Unexpected Wildflowers”

  1. I don’t know why, but I had to stare at that cactus shot for a little while to figure out where the cactus was. Maybe my eyes are going bad, and aren’t as sharp as the cactus. But because it fooled my eyes so well, that is my favorite of these photos.

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    1. It is a National Wildlife Refuge and they do intentional burns from time-to-time to protect the grassland from encroachment by the cedar and shinoak. The endangered birds that nest here need a particular habitat that they try to protect. The place is ugly after one of the burns, but it doesn’t take long for the grass to recover.

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    1. Cheap is a relative term here. I can see the performance differences in extreme situations though; especially in the out-of-focus areas. I’m happy with the little Nikon Z50 and kit lens for hiking around, it’s very light and takes much better photos than a phone would.

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