The obligatory annual glowing poppy shot! Rather similar in nature to my image 'Rouge' but this time shot in the morning, shortly after sunrise. There's a bit of a story behind this shot actually... a story with a moral even! Last summer after two and a half year's steady shooting I one day thought to myself "what if something goes wrong... what if by some freak accident I manage to lose all my images?"... it's something that's always possible in the digital age but also one of those things you think will never happen to you... So about this time last year I decided it might be a good idea to finally make a backup of my images. A month later on one of my more clumsy mornings I inadvertantly decided to test how good my hard drive was at flying. Turns out not so good. Tripping over a wire I watched it fall as if in slow motion as it came crashing off my desk and smashed onto the metal speaker stand next to it. One buggered hard drive. What this meant is that I lost all of the originals for my poppy shots from last year, only able to salvage those I had sent to my printers and those which had been shortlisted for LPOTY. I tried my best to recover it through a data recovery agency but to no avail and paid over £100 for the privilege... I was pretty gutted. But damn. Think how much worse it could have been! Having only thought of backing up as an afterthought a month or so previously I think I can count my blessings my entire portfolio wasn't wiped out! Most definitely a lesson learned the hard way. Nowadays I backup once a week and for good measure once a month to a hard drive outside of the property in case of fire or burglary.... not taking any chances anymore! So yeah, the moral is BACK YOUR PHOTOS UP! I can't imagine what I would have been like had I lost everything... Anyway... about the shot! You'll have to excuse the samey-ness but this is essentially a replacement for last year's effort so I can finally print it big. The shot is the result of three consecutive mornings scouting my local area before sunrise in the hope of catching a glimpse of a glowing red field at dawn. Despite having been given a tip-off from a friend about a field they had seen I think they might have been tripping or something cos I looked all around where they told me to look and couldn't find a thing! Casting my net further afield I kept on scouting though and eventually stumbled upon this field on the second morning just as the sun disappeared behind the bank of cloud and the light was gone. I did get a glimpse of what the field had to offer though and on the third morning I finally had my shot. I have to confess the amount of time it took to blend this image makes me wish I had some grads! 4 exposures in all, as it was also my first attempt at 'focus bracketing'. Very fiddly work but totally worth it when you view the file at 100%... diffraction-free and sharp as hell front to back :) Happy father's day to all the dads out there! Adam (P.S. bit behind on catching up on here, I'll sort that out in the coming days :))