Does the lack of dof bother anyone? It was pouring down rain, I was having trouble with the QR plate on my macro lens and was fighting to adjust the legs on my crappy gitzo tripod to get the camera in plane with the flowers so dof wasn’t what I wanted. The flower seem sharp enough but I wish a few more of the leaves were sharp. This was originally shot as a horizontal. I envisioned a vertical but didn’t want to trample any flowers, so I flipped it in PS.
This was another shot from the meetup with Ed Mcguirk, Patricia Brundage and Ed Lowe.
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Lack of DOF? To my eye this is pretty hard to beat. Without pixel peeping, to me a rather silly exercise for flowers, it’s my opinion that somewhat imperfect focus often works to your advantage, because having everything tack sharp tends to look “studio” rather than natural, furthermore your focus selection draws the eye to your subject. Some may like to focus stack, but I personally prefer the challenge of getting the essentials sharp and letting the rest go where it may. And besides, the blooms have good detail, and the greens work beautifully against the clean white.
As to rotating, I have shot lots of small subjects, especially small flowers, from above, and in truth in most cases, any orientation is completely natural. Michael, this is top notch imagery.
Michael: Even the thumbnail got my attention so, no the lack of DOF is no issue for me. I agree with Bill regarding the challenges and rewards of single capture. This is just excellent. >=))>
This is downright gorgeous Mike, nice job. No problems with lack of DOF here, this DOF looks perfect for this scene, it keeps the emphasis on the flowers. I love your placement of the three flowers in this composition, it is very dynamic. Those water drops are absolutely exquisite. From being there with you when you shot this, I’ll testify that no water spray bottles were involved in the making of this image. It was actually pouring rain, and one could not have asked for better conditions than these. Other than @Ed_Lowe getting lost, we couldn’t have had a better afternoon of shooting
I have been fooling around with my own bunchberry images, and they make for some wonderful B&W conversions as well, the texture of the leaves are great for B&W.
This works just fine for me as presented, Mike. I think the areas that need to be sharp; flowers and some water drops; are in focus. My only suggestion; very minor; would be a small crop from the top to get rid of that black spot on the one leaf right of center. @Ed_McGuirk: yeah I did get culled from the herd didn’t I.
Fabulous intimate Michael. The top left flower is slightly softer than the bottom right but it’s not that evident really. The water on the leaves is the added feature that makes these images special. The whites are handled well.
