Sunflowers with two bumble bees on a sunny morning. A few weeks after this was shot a micro-burst hit the area and the entire field of sunflowers was flattened.
Nikon D750 Nikon 24-120 F9 1/320 ISO 100
Look closely to see the morning dew, other bugs and the shadow of the bumble bee. I tried to darken the background to make the main sunflower pop from the background.
My first post to the Flora critiques.
Comments and critiques please
Superb detail in the flower and bees, Andrew, and you did an excellent job on the yellows, which can be very challenging. I do think you could crop the right side to just past the in focus leaf on that side of the main bloom. The sunflower is pointing just a little left, so you don’t need that much room behind it and there’s a brightish leaf or two sticking into that edge that draw my eye.
Nice and sharp, good use of dof placement
Andrew: Welcome to Flora and thanks for a good first post. For me the star of the show is certainly the main flower and pretty much all of the BG is distracting. I’ll post a couple of crop suggestions and I also brought up the brightness of the bees a bit to show more of their detail and did a tiny bit of flower cleanup on the tighter crop. Great to have you aboard and looking forward to more. >=))>
Thanks for the extra effort on my sunflower. Much appreciated. I like your square crops. Great stuff.
I agree with Dennis about the right side. I would go even further and just take out that torn leaf. The bumblebees are a nice feature. I think I would brighten up the front half of the bees to get a little more color and texture in them. Finally, there is a dark spot on one of the petals at about 3 o’clock. I would make that go away.
Andrew,
Great job on the detail and I agree with Dennis, great job with the color - the yellow is perfect.
So since crops are being mentioned, but only thought really was a crop from the left to remove the stalk there on the left. It would crop in to the bg sunflower, but I think that would be ok, and then combined with a slight crop from the right as Phil suggests to clean up the right edge. Minor suggestions at best.
Processing looks good and again, details excellent.
Lon
I like Bill’s edit. I would take it a step further and eliminate the OOF bloom lower right.
