The conventional advice to budding landscape photographers is not to shoot in the middle of a sunny day when the extreme contrast and harsh shadows just don’t make for a pretty picture. (Maybe if you are shooting just for dramatic black and white, but that is another topic altogether).
It is not a bad general rule, but like all rules, meant to be broken, especially if the middle of the day is when the cactus blooms open. The key is to control the contrast. If you can keep those really deep, distracting shadows out of the frame, you can make a mid-day image work. And a great way to do that with wildflowers is to get really low and shoot across the tops of the lit wildflowers, and not down into dark shadows.
Add in some dramatic clouds and I can live with the mid-day haze. Overall, kind of pretty, especially those little rainbow cacti happily blooming in the mid-day sun.
Canon 5D. ISO 800. 19mm. f.16 @ 1/125 second.
