Mushrooms on forest floor

New to this forum.
My first macro lens! Arrived one day prior.
Mushrooms were approx 1" tall, on forest floor. Camera on ground and propped up with sticks to frame image. Flash with 12" softbox hand-held at approx 10:00, 6" from subject. Not much ambient light.
Sony a7Riv, Sony 90mm macro lens; ISO 320, 1/80, f/13; flash in TTL at -3
Any/all critiques/suggestions welcome!
Thanks,
Barry

What technical feedback would you like if any?

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Pertinent technical details or techniques:

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Barry, first of all, welcome to NPN. So good to have you on board. I hope that you find this site to be all that you hoped it to be.

A new macro lens! How exciting. I find macro photography so rewarding. Being able to see the tiny details in bugs, insects, etc., as well as plant life, just amazes me.

This is a very nice first macro image to post on this site. You did a fine job with the flash and diffuser. There are a few brighter spots in the background that is a bit distracting that you might could clone out if yo chose to. I am actually thinking that maybe a square crop might work better for the mushrooms. Just a thought.

A very pleasing image. Love the colors of the mushrooms.

Ah, yes! I see what you mean.
I tried to remove the bright green leave in the foreground in LR, but only messed up the image…so I gave up.
Thanks!
Barry

Barry: Welcome to NPN and to Macro. You are entering an entire new world of possibilities and opportunities. I started in Macro with your lens’ grandfather, a 100mm Minolta that remains to this day the sharpest lens in my bag. I like your subject and your DOF/POF choice. The entire image is underexposed about 1 stop so I boosted that some. The offending bright spots in the BG are more easily dealt with in PS than Lightroom IMO with either the healing brush, clone tool or content aware fill. I used the content aware approach here. I see Shirley’s idea about the crop but this does work for me as is. Great to have you aboard and looking forward to more of your work and comments on others’ images. >=))>

PS: When preparing your image for posting please reduce its size to 1500-1750 pixels on the long side. Posting full resolution images taxes the server a bit, makes your image a more inviting target for image thieves and can effect the quality of the posted result due to site compression.

Oh wow, I like what @Bill_Fach did here. Really nice.

Welcome to macro world Barry. Mushrooms always make for interesting photos and these 3 are very nice. Welcome to NPN

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Definite improvement! Thanks!

Definite improvement! Thanks!

Barry, welcome to NPN. This is a good first macro post where you’ve handled the lighting well. You’ll have a lot of fun with that lens. With the out of focus surroundings, you could get in a bit tighter, but that would mean less depth-of-field, a constant trade-off in macro photography.

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