Papaver orientale

Hooray!! My first oriental. I have had a terrible time growing
perennial oriental poppies, for some reason. I have tried from seed a
few times without success, and even mail-ordered root stock has failed
for me a couple of times. I put in a few roots again last fall, and
here is my first success. This is one of the red varieties, as opposed
to the species orange, and he just opened this morning after an
overnight rain.

This is also an example of working to get reds right in the image. For
reasons I have never really understood, bright saturated reds tend to
overexpose. This leads to a picture with just a splotch of bright red
color with no texture or detail. To compensate for that, this image
was underexposed by 1-1/3 stops. Even then, I also had to reduce the
luminescence (brightness) of the red channel by an additional 55% to
pull out the texture in the petals.

Canon 1DmkIII; EF16-35mm f2.8L; 35mm; ISO-200; f5.6; 1/80-sec