Thanks Marty, they remind me of our trip to Sedona, Arizona and the way hundreds of people stopped to watch and photograph the sunset. This was a similar experience.
The white part of the sun is too bright and takes the eyes away from the sunflowers. I would have either cropped the bright part out or added color to the white area. IMHO
Guess my art teacher was right. The sun really is that bright. I've looked at it. I had taken lots of shots without the sun but this one because of the sun's brightness really begged to be used. Will try that next year.
When the sunflowers blossomed they soon became a local attraction. Traffic jams and near accidents made the scene pretty exciting. I shot some pics at the beginning of the day one morning last week and thinking I had gotten the job done was satisfied that I got a sense of this phenomena. My wife(much smarter than I) said we should go back at the end of the day. One of my art teachers in elementary school mentioned that one should never put the sun in the picture, but combining my wife's advice and disregarding the lesson of the art teacher I came up with the second pic which captures the flavor of the hot dry summer we've been having.
I went for a walk on Saturday with my wife and 1 year old granddaughter. My wife collected rocks for painting, our granddaughter collected zzzzs, and I collected photos.