A lone flower in the Greenery

[AdamJ]

I thought I'd try this, see if you guys can give me some tips on my photos.


Full sized image: Here

Camera: Sony Nex-5
Lens: 18-55mm Kit Lens
F Number: f/5.6
Exposure: 1/100 (ISO 200)
Focal Length: 55mm
Colour Profile: sRGB IEC61966-2.1

That's the information iPhoto tells me from the EXIF, so hope that explains it. I'm mainly looking for tips on how I can go about improving the capture, and tips to improve photography in the long run. I'm not entirely confident in Manual just yet, but I'd like to get into it very soon.

[Tito87]

Beautiful flower, and it looks sharp enough. I'd would try to place it away from the center of the frame.

[TilenHrovatic]

The flower is beautiful, I like the warm colours But the background is not really good. And I agree with Tito87, try to place it away from the centre.

[Doug Sundseth]

It sounds like you're looking for a general critique, so here goes:

White Balance: Looks a bit green to me. I'd try pulling it a few points toward magenta to see what it looks like.

Exposure: The subject looks a bit underexposed to me, though the background looks reasonable. You might try raising the exposure of your light colors in post.

Focus/DOF: Good. When you're shooting a flattish flower from a low angle like this, you can't really go for extremely shallow DOF without losing focus on parts of the flower. That only works if you want to focus on only a part of the bloom. This also means that you're going to get some detail on the background in most cases, especially with a kit lens that doesn't have a very close minimum focus distance.

Subject: IMO, when you're shooting flowers, you need to either find nearly perfect examples or examples that are imperfect in interesting ways. Some of the petals on this one look folded or broken, which hurts the picture a bit.

Composition: Your background isn't very interesting (often the case with flowers), so I'd recommend a tighter shot or a tighter crop. At the least, I'd try to get rid of the leaves that are intruding into the sides of the frame; there's either too much or too little of them here.

The leaf behind the flower might work better to either side (change your shot angle) rather than growing out of the top of the flower.

There's a transition from green vegetation to black (dirt?) running most of the way across the photo. I'd recommend trying to frame the shot so that the flower is against one or the other rather than across the transition. This should draw the eye better to the flower.

HTH

[AdamJ]

Thanks guys, I appreciate it. I'll get taking some more soon and get another posted up.