[/caption] The Willamette Valley offers some of the best nursery’s in the Country and Adelman Peony Farms is no exception. They have acres of Peony’s that you can simply walk through and get some of the most awesome pictures. There are several different species and colors throughout the farm so you will find yourself spending hours taking in the photographic opportunities that abound. You will surely want to include your macro and your wide angle lens in order to take advantage of this gem. I’m not sure when Peony’s stop blooming but I would advise visiting during Spring. This shot was taken on 5/30/10 at about 2:50pm. Because I wasn’t using my tripod, I removed my CIR-PL but attached my warming filter in order to bring out the contrast of the flowers. However, using my CIR-PL without a tripod would surely have created a blurry photo. This is especially true since I was standing so close to the flowers. I was using my Tokina 12-24mm wide angle lens and had the focal length at 15mm. I wanted to maintain a strong field of view so I stood back just enough so the clouds and the flowers were in focus. Using any other lens would have kept parts of the photo out of focus. I did experiment with my macro lens but found that the Peony’s looked nice as a panoramic photo with the crazy looking clouds lurking the background. I was facing towards the sun so the photo was a little overexposed, especially since I wasn’t using my CIR-PL. However, I made some changes in Photoshop in order to decrease the brightness of the clouds as well as darken them enough to bring out some of their personality. The camera mode was in Normal/Program so the aperture was at F-9 and the shutter speed at 1/160 second. I set the ISO at 100 and the white balance at +0.3.