Still Life With Poppies

I absolutely adore poppies. The garish red splash of colour they produce in the month of June is a sheer delight. I have always fancied doing a poppy still  life, but here, in West Yorkshire, they are quite rare and chances of being in a position to pick them and take them home rather slim. To be fair, you can see quite a lot of this giant cultivated variety in private and public gardens, but it is the wild poppy species that I really like.
Thanks to my dog walking (my dog, really) I came across a clusters of crimson red poppies around the entrance to a local field. They seemed to have sprung there overnight. I picked one stem on the way back home and put it in a small vase. The stem had just one flower open and a few furry buds. The next day another flower unfurled from one of the buds, its delicate papery look petals forming a full circle while the older flower petals curled backwards. I had to capture this stunning ethereal beauty with a camera as soon as possible as I didn't know how long these gorgeous flowers last cut. The stem was long and flower heads facing upwards, so I chose a  point of view from above. I placed my pale green tablecloth on the floor near the dining room window and the vase with the poppies on top of it, and took a few shots with my iPhone.

I cropped the image a little and processed it using the Retrolux tool in Snapseed. The whole process from setting up the shot to editing it took just twenty minutes. A very quick creation, considering that not that long ago I'd spend hours creating a still life image. This is one of the joys and advantages of iPhoneography over conventional photography - you can work much faster with the results being just as good if not even better sometimes......