David Maitland's Image

On a car-park embankment near David's home in Wiltshire, a mass of poppies appeared one day.

'I love poppies,' he says, 'and I can't resist photographing them. It's hard to think of another plant that's so fleetingly beautiful . . . But when poppies flower en masse, it's almost too much, and it's hard to capture the ephemeral nature of their beauty.' For a week he checked on the patch every day, looking for a particular grouping. 'I wanted an image of simplicity - mostly of spent seedheads, with just a few poppies still in full bloom,' he explains. From a prone position, he shot them against an overcast sky to create an architecture of stems 'with little flashes of brilliance'. Three days later, someone 'weed-killered the lot,' he says. 'Most hadn't set seed. So there'll be no poppy meadow there next year.'