Scenes from a meadow

The conditions very early in the mornings have been exactly perfect for meadow photography. Here's how our meadow looked to my camera eye at sunrise a couple of days ago.

A heavy dose of Echinacea

Up close and personal

Monard didyma, usually finished blooming by this time
but extended by cool, wet season

Liatris and Ratibida coming on strong
with Monarda in background

Ratibida with soft Monarda colors in background

More information about our meadow and how and why we planted it is at my website.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Meadow flowers coming on

Our meadow is beginning to come into bloom. Here are the first flowers:

Monarda didyma - I love their soft color and interesting shape

Rudbeckia hirta with what I'm guessing is a switch grass
(Panicum virgatum)

Echinacea pallida - the delicate-looking pale coneflower

Purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea)
We saw this in Colorado, and grew it from seed
and added it to the meadow

Butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), a favorite Monarch butterfly
plant, which I had not seen in the meadow before,
even though it was part of the seed mix.

More information about our meadow is here at my website.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

It's so lovely we're up at dawn

Our meadow is so good right now that my friends from my camera club are eager to be here at the ungodly hour of of 6:30 am to give it a go. I've got two more people coming tomorrow morning. Coffee is on me.

You can see why we tend to do close-up work. There is so much natural exuberance that to get a shot that works, you really have to focus on details.

Today's guest photo: bergamot, also called bee balm, and here's why:

Photo: Margaret Grant (who also took my blog bio picture)
From me: another overlay, combining
a sharp exposure with a soft one
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

More meadow: My friends' pictures

I asked the gals who came to photograph the meadow on the weekend if they would like a share a favorite picture.

Ratibida group by Karla Bondy
Ratibida portrait by Sandy Barbour
And here's one from me from this morning - still experimenting with image overlays:

Dreamy Echinacea
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Today's meadow picture

A couple of gals from my camera club came early this morning, and so there were three of us in the meadow shooting the wildflowers. We started at 6:40, and were lucky that it didn't get breezy until 8 o'clock.

My picture of the echinaceas and bergamot is an image overlay created in-camera. (Certain Nikons digital SLRs have this capability.) What you do is shoot one exposure sharp and another out of focus. Then the camera's software lets you overlay the two images and adjust their luminousity. This is the effect. You can also do this in Photoshop with two images or just one, as long is you create an out-of-focus copy.

Me at play - thanks to Karla Bondy for the picture
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Scenes from our meadow

The meadow on our property is my favorite site for garden photography right now.

By nature I'm a night-hawk, not an early riser, but it's rewarding to get up at 6 in the morning and go out with the camera to capture the wildflowers.

I need to get up early because some time between 7:30 and 8am it gets too breezy to photograph. When the flowers start dancing, I go in for breakfast.

These pictures are from this morning and early yesterday. The dominant prairie plants in flower at the moment are the greyheaded coneflower (Ratibida pinnata), Echinaceas (E. purpurea, and E. pallida, the latter just past its prime), wild bergamot or beebalm (Monarda fistulosa) and prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya), above right, with Ratibida.

Prairie ballerinas: grey-headed coneflowers (Ratibida pinnata)
Purple coneflowers with bergamot
For more on our meadow and how we got it established from seed in 2000, visit this page on my website.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener