Lavender dreams

In the Provence region of France, thousands of acres of beautiful lavender flowers bloom every summer. I used two compositional techniques to photograph these landscapes: (1) A wide angle lens placed very close to the immediate foreground to exaggerate the size of the flowers near the camera, and (2) a telephoto lens which compresses the rows of flowers into a mass of color. Both techniques require complete depth of field. For the telephoto compositions, like this shot, it was difficult to hold focus throughout the image especially when the lens was positioned somewhat close to the foreground. Therefore, I resorted to focus stacking. My settings for this photo were 1/80, f/9, and 400 ISO, and I used a 180mm focal length.