Grass at Sunset

[stevesutt89]

Hi all!
I took this shot just on sunset about 100 metres down the road from my place where some grass decided to grow on the side of the road. I used f/2.8 aperture with a fairly long zoom (12x) to artificially decrease the depth of field, before doing some minor color enhancements and blurring.



I quite like this shot myself (but then again I took it!) but I'm interested to see what other, more knowledgeable, people have to say about it.

All comments/criticisms welcome!

/*EDIT: sorry to be a bother, but can anyone tell me why the image is only displayed as a link and not an image (i used the IMG and /IMG tags outside the flickr URL that i got from the image)*/
/*EDIT: not to worry, all fixed now*/

[Digidave]

Not to bad! Except the top & bottom portions are out of focus. The entire plant should be in focus with just the background being out of focus. I'm not sure but maybe a little less zoom & get a little closer to the plant? It's got good potential though. Keep it up.

[stevesutt89]

Thanks for that! thats just the sort of thing I wanted to know.
I had actually blurred the top and the bottom of the plant with Google's Picasa, so here is an unblurred version

[The Mighty2006]

Much better.

The subject of the phot can now be identified.

Keep shooting.

Great blurred background also.

[jiminyClickit]

stevesutt89,

Much better, more natural. If background were not so bright, the stalk would stand out even more. First one seems less intense; did you up contrast on second?

[Christa]

I really like it with the stem focused in. I never would have thought to say that.

For some reason I like the background blur in the 1st pic, in the 2nd I find the black/purple blur a little distracting from the focus in front which is neutral in color. I don't know if anyone else agrees with me on this though.

[Christa]

LOL the 3 of us online said the same thing. Glad to see I am not always in the dark with my comments

[jiminyClickit]

Christa,

It once took me so long to type a post, 5 other people posted in between. And I sort of repeated what they said. It happens; made me learn to type a little faster and in shorter English! Good eye on the background.

[stevesutt89]

In reply to jiminyClickit's question, no, i did not up the contrast in the second, but i had to re-edit it from scratch, which included re leveling the colours (which gave the appearance of upping the contrast). Here is a third edit of my picture with the background more blurred, slightly less purple and slightly darker.

[Christa]

I like it much better. The bottom flowers blend much better into the background. I did notice that the 3rd pic of grass seems to glow more than the 1st. Was this deliberate or because of the tweaking with the background edit? I am just curious.