ILLUMINATING THE CONEFLOWERS

The forecast was to be another sunny beautiful day so, I left the house around 4:30 am and headed to the Burnidge Forest Preserve. The previous days I scouted out a few areas to photograph the wildflowers and the Burnidge Forest Preserve had plenty to photograph so, I made that my priority today. I knew where in the preserve I wanted to go to photograph the wildflowers because, there were an abundance of them. It wasn't long before I reached the area of wildflowers I wanted to photograph. As I came upon the wildflowers, I noticed a few tall purple flowers standing out from the other wildflowers and knew that those were the blazing stars. The sun was just breaking the tree tops from the forest behind, as the sunlight illuminated the prairie and these yellow coneflowers during the early morning hours. Many species of wildflowers were in prime conditions to photograph including these yellow coneflowers that were near the blazing star flowers, false sunflowers and hoary vervain that I had just photographed. These yellow coneflowers were off in the distance some but, I thought they looked in great condition and compositionally eye appealing. I set up my tripod, camera, composed and focused on the yellow coneflowers and began photographing. The Yellow Coneflower is a perennial plant that reaches about 4 ft tall and is very common to the prairies. The silvery checkerspot butterfly caterpillar feeds on the Yellow coneflower as do some moth species. Goldfinches sometimes can be seen feeding on the seeds. (513-17)