I dreamt of Shenzhen

Lotus flowers play an important role in China, it is associated with purity, spiritual awaking and faithfulness. And we eat them...

In Shenzhen, Honghu park is known for its lotus flowers in the summer. I've seen it on one previous occasion, but this year it is even more special. All the smaller ponds in the park are full in bloom, it is an amazing sight.

In the evening of the day I arrived, I saw this marvel and realised that my (photography) focus will be on this for the next couple of days or weeks.

That night I dreamt about the lotus flowers! In my dream, I was lying on my back and the pink flowers were drifting in the sky, and as they were drifting higher and higher, they melted in with the sky, until the whole sky was a pink colour and it was impossible to distinguish between the sky and the flowers.

And the leaves became part of the blue sky...

The next morning I knew I had to photograph them in infrared.
I wanted to capture the images of my dream

I created a custom white balance in camera and manually force it to the red/blue side in the fine-tune setting.

The resulting flowers were a warm pink or a cold orange flower amongst a sea of turquoise leaves. In photoshop I forced it further to the pink and blue of my dream using the channel mixer.

The first morning I only took my 14mm lens with me which meant I could only concentrate on wide angle landscapes photos.

The biggest challenge was to find angles that will exclude the city and its people.

That afternoon I went back - this time with the 55-200 zoom lens.

The leaves and the flowers became the sky.

This is my #landscapephotography entry for the week.

Hope you like it.