These photos were taken during a friends and family day at a sunflower farm. I only brought my camera with a 85mm lens and no extra gear. No reflectors. No modifiers. I even forgot to pack my lens filter, so I had to deal with the bright sun, but luckily the clouds rolled in and helped soften it. Whenever the sun dipped behind a cloud, I took advantage and shot fast. I kept a high shutter speed because the kids never stopped moving, and I shot with a fairly wide aperture to separate them from the background and let the colors stand out.

The colors honestly did most of the work. The magenta dress against the yellow sunflowers and green fields looked perfect without planning anything. We found this old VW Bug covered in turquoise paint, rust, peace signs, flowers and random artwork, and it added even more color without forcing it. Later, she wandered into a patch of globe amaranth, which added more magenta and violet tones that naturally matched her dress. None of this was staged. The kids were just exploring and I tried to keep up while paying attention to the light and the colors around us.

In Lightroom, I didn’t have to do a lot. I corrected the exposure, used a few masks to highlight the focal point, and bumped up the saturation and contrast a little. The colors were already vibrant and complimentary, so the edit was more about polishing what was already there instead of trying to fix anything. The photos already had strong color. I just cleaned them up.