So if you haven’t guess yet, this is officially Sunflower Week on Wednesdays in Marblehead.  The last two days featured macro images cropped to square format and with varying color and black and white treatment.  Today’s image features a single sunflower along the fence and comes from my new favorite patch in town.

As I mentioned previously, I’m not much of a flower photographer with the exception of cherry blossoms in the Spring and sunflowers at the end of Summer.  There’s something about the sunflower which arrives at the end of August as the days begin to shorten that offers hope that the warm days aren’t quite done yet.

I had found a great patch of giant sunflowers on West Shore Drive last year and did my best with those.  This year, thanks to a wrong turn, I found a new patch of the flowers.  I quickly set to work shooting on a late Summer day at the end of August.  I took turns with different lenses to try to get the best compositions that I could.  This image was taken with a 100mm f/2 lens and the background dissolved into the creamy soft colors you see thanks to the large aperture of the lens.  There was just something about this sunflower in the back of the patch and it’s sinewy form along the strong diagonals of the fence that seemed to scream out ‘choose me’!