Wild Flowers

[xxxsnookxxx]

Found this bunch of wildflowers the other dat got a nice close up of this one liked the photo do you think the composition is ok? color? focus? Camera Nikon D7000
Exposure 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 170 mm
Focal Length 169.5 mm
ISO Speed 100

[GeorgieB]

Nice colors, good focus on the flower itself.

As far as composition, you might crop the photo to remove the out-of-focus flower on the right. It's distracting. Most of the macro flower photos I've seen have the main subject centered.

All-in-all, a nice photo

George
D90, too many lenses to list
P7000 Coolpix as a carry-around camera

[Doug Sundseth]

I like the colors on this photo, though I might pull up the vibrancy and/or saturation just a bit. (Personal style issue, though. If this suits your vision, you shouldn't change it.)

The focus on the top petals of the flower is good, but it looks like the extremely shallow DOF is dropping the bottom petals out of focus. If you want the whole flower in focus, you'll need to shoot dead on perpendicular to the plane of the petals or close down your aperture.

I agree that the out-of-focus flower in the lower right is distracting. I'd just remove it with a crop.

I don't think I'd put the flower dead center, but closer to the center might be pleasing.

The seed pod above the flower is also a bit distracting. If you were to shoot from a slightly lower angle, you could probably hide that behind the primary subject. (But watch out for DOF issues as you move up or down.)

[Dadorian]

I liked it a lot, and found the other comments interesting. I am a beginner so have no words of wisdom except thanks for posting. May I ask what lens you used?

Ian

[xxxsnookxxx]

Thank you for the replies and suggestions i am learning alot on here being new to photography its nice to have somewhere to have others help you from their experiences.and the lens was nikon 55-300mm 3.5/5.6 vr

[Shawn7656]

I really like the flower in general, but I think, like other are saying, it could help if you cropped it. Continue to alter the picture by removing objects from the background, and blurring the background a tad could help the photo along, and draw your eyes to the flower more.. Sorta like this:




What I did to get this result: In Lightroom (you can use any photo-processing tool) I changed the white balance a little bit to bring out the colors a bit more. I've never seen this kind of flower so I'm not sure what it looked like originally, or what you were going for. I upped the contrast a lot. This is something I do to almost ever picture, but with macro it seems to bring the details out in the subject, and make the background less distracting at the same time (win win). After changing the curves a little bit (to try to bring out detail) I threw the pic into Photoshop. I was using CS5, and it has an option called "content aware fill" and I used this to get rid of the flowers/weeds behind and in front of the subject. I didn't really spend much time blending it so it could look better. Similar effects can be found using the clone stamp, patching tool, and healing brushes if you don't have CS5. I then cropped the photo to get rid of what I thought of as useless background. For a long time I was afraid to crop because I didn't want to bring out the pixels or noise, but once I started to I realized this isn't really a problem unless you crop past 100% (I was very used to P&S cameras). Anyways... I then made a duplicate layer (ctrl [or command on mac]+ J) and put a highpass filter on it (Filters > Other > Highpass...) and brought the radius down really low (to around 1 or 2). Put the blending mode on the layer to Overlay or something in the same group and this will sharpen your image without bringing out messed up coloration you can get with other sharpening techniques.

Most of what I did probably wasn't necessary, and may not be to your liking, but I figured I'd let you know anyways. If you don't like it on this photo, you may be able to use it elsewhere


If you have CS5 and don't know about content-aware fill, here's a quick look
YouTube - ‪Photoshop CS5: Content-Aware Fill‬‏