More About the Sun Than Of It
I wanted to be up early just for the chance to make this photograph. Haze from Canadian wildfires had transformed the morning and evening skies, offering better opportunities to photograph the sun well above the horizon, and I thought cornfields would make the perfect foreground.
Foreground is an important element in photographing the sun and moon, especially if a photographer wants a photograph that is more about the subject than about it.
The sun alone would have been little more than a bright disk in a colored sky. The corn gives it context. The stalks, leaves and tassels establish place, season and scale while remaining dark enough not to compete with the light above them.
The wildfire haze made the composition possible in another way. It reduced the sun’s intensity enough that the disk remained clearly defined while the sky held bands of red, magenta, and blue. The haze became part of the photograph’s visual structure, not merely an atmospheric condition.
The corn occupies nearly the entire lower half of the frame, yet it is rendered almost entirely as a silhouette. That reduction is useful. The field is immediately recognizable without much internal detail. The irregular heights of the tassels and leaves create a broken edge against the sky, keeping the foreground active without becoming distracting.
The sun sits above that edge, with enough separation to remain distinct. Its near-central placement works because the foreground is so irregular. The plants prevent the composition from becoming rigid, while the color shift in the sky adds another form of movement to the photograph.
The warmer tones high in the frame gradually give way to cooler blue tones near the corn. That contrast separates the sky from the dark foreground and gives the photograph depth, even though there is little conventional detail in the lower half.
The cornfield is therefore not merely something placed beneath the sun. It is what makes the photograph specific. Without it, the image could have been made almost anywhere.
With it, the photograph becomes about a particular morning, a particular season and a particular place.
That is the difference between making a photograph of the sun and making one about the sun.
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