The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I was out looking for birds with a 600m prime lens on a crop sensor camera, but came across a lovely and unexpected group of yellow iris flowers. A bit of a ridiculous camera/lens combo, but I think it worked OK! I like the warm yellows and how you can feel this is part of a cluster of flowers.
I would have liked a little more room, but fixed focal length made that tricky!
Specific Feedback
This isn’t what I would think to do for a flora shot (not that I really have much experience there), but I’m curious what your impressions are! Thoughts on crop/processing especially.
Is the petal coming in from the edge too distracting? I can’t see a way to clone it out given it overlaps with the flower behind.
Hi Matt. I don’t think you could crop out the petal on the left (at least I couldn’t). I think cropping in from the right quite a ways would help. The image feels unbalanced to me with all the in-focus stuff on the left.
A riot of color! The hope of spring and the joy of summer all rolled into one. Your choice of composition is an interesting one. Can you talk a little about that?
@Kris_Smith I wanted to preserve the feeling of this being one flower at the edge of a bigger cluster, I thought the green and yellow in the BG helped with that, but @Dennis_Plank is right that it’s quite unbalanced.
There will probably still be a lot of colour in the BG with a much tighter crop
It was a very opportunistic capture, I would’ve loved if there was an angle where I could get just one flower in the frame, but I still love it for some reason. Maybe just the memory of the walk
Matt. I don’t know if it would work with this lens, but it can be very effective to fous on a bloom in the middle of the pack with the foreground blooms completely out of focus. It’s usually done with a wide open macro lens, but looking at the out of focus blooms in this image makes me think it might work, particularly if your in-focus bloom is at minimum focal distance.
Thanks Dennis! I’ve got a macro-ish 35mm f/1.8 lens that gets to 0.5x magnification, 35mm might be too short for this technique but I’ll give it a try
Matt: Terrific color palette and a very effective DOF choice. My first impression even with the thumbnail was the imbalance mentioned and I wondered, “why not just rotate the camera left and include the other flower?” Another alternative would be to go portrait orientation and crop away the left flower completely. I did that and did some other cleanup on the petal that would have exited the frame. Back to you. >=))>
Thumbs up for @Bill_Fach’s version!! It’s all about balancing the visual weight in the frame. There is a bit of yellow cast here, which is limiting tonal detail. I’m guessing going back to the raw file and playing with WB might give a slight improvement without losing the dramatic color.
