A couple of weeks ago I found out there was a poppy field not far from my house, but it took until last week for a sunny evening to coincide with me being free to go there.
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-5.jpg)
I got there about an hour before sunset and had to work round a couple of families and someone doing a model shoot, but I got a few shots I liked.
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-6.jpg)
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-2-1.jpg)
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-2-2.jpg)
Sadly a lot of the area around the track through the field had been trampled down by visitors. I did my best not to add to it, though it had reached the point where it was hard to work out what areas were the actual track!
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/poppy-trampling.jpg)
It did however mean there were a few poppies standing up in front of relatively clean backgrounds if you looked around.
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-7.jpg)
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-2-4-1.jpg)
I was hoping for a nice sunset, but as the sun started to go behind a bank of cloud on the horizon I realised it wasn’t going to happen.
So I switched to HDR mode on my Olympus EM1 mkii and selected the exposure bracketing mode on 7 images and shot looking straight into the sun. I then took the 5 covering the range of exposures I wanted and merged them in Lightroom when I got home and got this image.
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-4.jpg)
I tried a shooting with the sun behind the flower shot – not sure it works to be honest…
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-2-3.jpg)
I waited just in case, but the sun never did light up the sky, but I took one last shot as the sun went behind the trees and cloud
![](http://www.uk-wildlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Common-Poppy-Papaver-rhoeas-8.jpg)