A moment in time
Clever use of depth of field and a daring crop transform this shot
My photograph was taken during a walk along the fields with a friend. It was a beautiful sunny day and I saw a large area of dandelions, so I asked my companion to play with them.
I took a lot of different shots, but with this one I found something deeper, and I think there is a bit of space for imagination. You can see a kiss, a blow of dandelions, a woman spreading the seeds of future life. It was taken with my Nikon D5500 with a 35mm lens, set to 1/4,000 sec at f/1.8.
You are absolutely right when you say you’ve left something for the imagination. Your decision to shoot wide open at f/1.8, the radical crop that removes your friend’s eyes from the frame and processing it as a black-and-white all help to give it an air of mystery. And yet it is a really simple image – just a woman blowing the seeds from a dandelion.
Despite such a shallow depth of field, the focus on the hand and the group of dandelions means that the area you want is perfectly sharp. Of course it is the two little seeds that have blown off the seedhead that really make this shot; by using such a super-fast shutter speed they are absolutely frozen in time.
I think a square crop would be stronger, however, removing the woman’s nostrils from the frame and positioning her hand tighter to the bottom-left corner.