Spring Beauties

[Banewood]

This is my first posting to the critique section. I've had exposure problems in the past shooting the Spring Beauty. This is because the iridescence of the petals causes small grains of overexposure. Bracketing helped.

I used PhotoShop's sharpening filter to selectively focus the left-most and top-most blooms.

shutter speed: 1/3200
aperture: f/4
ISO: 200
focal length: 60mm
sunlight, hand-held

Do the shadows help or hurt? I'm thinking a ring flash would probably have helped a lot.

[xxrayna]

Personally, I like the shadows. They make it feel "real" to me.

[chicagojohn]

Originally Posted by xxrayna

Personally, I like the shadows. They make it feel "real" to me.

I agree completely. In addition, I love the bokeh or blur of the background; it makes the flowers pop. I also love the dynamic range -- the distribution of strong highlights and strong shadow.

The only thing I would suggest is that one of the petals over on the left side is a little soft. Maybe that could have been sharpened up a little by stopping down -- reducing the size of the aperture -- by going down one or two EV units (stops) from f/4 to f/5.6 or even f/8. To compensate exposure for this, you could have gone up one or two EV units in shutter speed.

Wheras you shot at f/4, going to f/5.6 cuts the light in half. To double the light in shutter speed to counterbalance this, you could have easily gone from 1/3200 s to 1/1600. And, then going another f/stop to f/8, cutting the light in half yet again, you could again compensate by going from 1/1600 to 1/800. There is really no action to stop here assuming the wind wasn't blowing, so reducing shutter speed doesn't cost you anything.

What would happen, however, is that because stopping down increases depth of field -- the distance range from the lens that is in acceptably sharp focus -- the nice blur in the background would have been reduced somewhat, depending upon how far behind the subject it was. And that, would be up to you to decide. Maybe you tried these alternatives and selected the one you did as best appearing to you, I don't know. Just thought I'd describe it in case you hadn't so that you may consider experimenting in the future.

[Banewood]

Thanks for the critique. Your advice is good, but I must train myself to check my shots more on site. I have to break an old-school photography habit of "waiting for development!"

[chicagojohn]

Originally Posted by Banewood

Thanks for the critique. Your advice is good, but I must train myself to check my shots more on site. I have to break an old-school photography habit of "waiting for development!"

I have the same problem. But in the interest of experimentation and learning, I've started purposfully modifying settings in manual and then reviewing them later to see and try to understand the effect. For me, that has been helpful.