Sunflowers all face the same way — which means the field decides what time you turn up.
This was shot on a Friday morning in August, in a sunflower field near North Berwick, two days before it closed for the season. Seven o'clock start. Naomi drove herself down from near Stirling and was there before I'd finished parking.
Why Seven in the Morning
Sunflowers face east. Not as a turn of phrase — literally. While the plants are young they track the sun across the sky through the day, but once the heads mature they stop moving and settle pointing at the sunrise, and that is where they stay for the rest of the season.
So a mature field is thousands of faces all turned the same direction. Get there early and the low sun comes in straight at them, and straight at you. Go back to the same field that evening and you are photographing the backs of their heads.
That is the whole reason for the early start. The field doesn't care what time is convenient.
How We Shot It
We spent the first stretch not shooting at all. Just walked the rows, talked, worked out which part of the field was catching the light best. I would rather lose fifteen minutes to that than start firing straight away and then spend the rest of the morning chasing a stiffness I put there myself.
Naomi did her own hair and makeup for this one and turned up ready to go, which at that hour is no small thing.
There are two ways to shoot a field like that at seven. Stand with the sun behind you and the faces light up, every petal separated, colour at its most saturated. Or get low and shoot into it, let the light come through the petals so the whole frame goes translucent and the edges blow out. We did both. The second is where the best frames came from.
The Edit
The temptation with sunflowers is to push the yellow until it glows, and it always looks cheap. I went the other way — held the yellows back, kept the greens honest rather than letting them go acid, and let the warmth come from the light that was actually there rather than from a slider.
