There's the sun

This a parasol flower I couldn’t help but notice the sun highlighting the yellow portion and I had to see if I could capture that wonderful feeling of the sun shining through.

What technical feedback would you like if any?

This is two images stacked. The images didn’t quite line up so there is some ghosting going on. . . .but I decided I like the effect of keeping the yellow center sharp and detailed while the petal are soft. Also did quite a bit of post process in LR & PS to bring down the highlighted areas.
Any suggestions and/or comments are always welcome.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Does this effect work for any of you??
Any suggestions and/or comments are always welcome.

Pertinent technical details or techniques:

Nikon D7200, f/14, 1/320 sec., ISO 250, 100mm

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Linda, I can see why you wanted to capture the “sunshine” of this flower. It works for me. I have never attempted to stack images yet, so have no suggestions in that area. I love the colors in this too.

Great lighting Linda, also love the color contrast. There are a few ways to align the two images. One way I do that is photoshop under Edit (windows) Auto Align, the default usually works. The images need to be in Layers. Select all images in the layer and use the auto align. Once aligned and saved, they can go back in the program that is doing the stacking. I think the Auto Blend layers also do the stacking as well although it has been a while since I did that.

Another way I could see doing what you wanted is get both images into Photoshop as layers and create a layer mask, this way you can control what you want to show in the bottom layer only. This method will prevent the ghosting. That all said the ghosting is pretty well blended in there so I would have likely missed it if you didn’t say anything. I love the sharpness in the middle. Great photo image.

Linda: Nicely done all around. I’m not a stacker either but this looks pretty good to me. I very much enjoy the challenges of shooting in light like this. Something I’ve been doing lately is to shoot a bracketed burst of five shots going from -2 stops through +2 in 1 stop steps and then doing an HDR merge in LR. It works amazingly well and I’ve found it to be remarkably less tedious than doing a lot of dodging and burning or double processing. High marks on this from me. >=))>

Linda, this is a great, artistic view into the heart of this flower. The warmth of the center looks great. Yes, movement creates artifacts in a stack that can only be fixed with a lot of effort in post processing. I see the shadow line problems, but they are fixable in photoshop. Use the clone tool at 15 - 30 % opacity to blend the edges. Since you may need some trial and error on picking where to clone from, you probably want to duplicate the background and work on the duplicate until you’re confident about what to use for your cloning source. Here’s a version that I spent maybe 3 minutes “fixing” using 20% opacity of my cloning and multiple strokes to clean each edge.

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@Shirley_Freeman, @Dean_Salman, @Bill_Fach and @Mark_Seaver I sincerely appreciate all of your comments and truly appreciate your taking the time to do so. @Dean_Salman, I have done some photo stacking in the past, but clearly more to learn. Thanks for the suggestions. @Bill_Fach, the only time I’ve used HDR process in the past has been with landscape type photos, but am spending the resting of the day experimenting with flowers. Thanks for the idea. @Mark_Seaver, I see what you mean about blending the edges, definitely makes for a smoother transition from the darks to lights. All of your thoughts have been extremely helpful to me. Thanks again.

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Hi Linda, a really intriguing shot you have caught here and the parasol is very evident in the center. The dreamy pinks frame the center nicely. My only tendency would be to move the yellow portion a bit to the right so it wasn’t so close to the middle. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks Jim, I’m glad you enjoyed it, appreciate your thoughts and comments.