Wintersweet

This flower is called “ROU-BAI” in Japanese. “ROU” means “wax” and “BAI” means “Japanese apricot”. It comes out in deep winter and smells sweet. I tried to catch the waxen texture of the petals against darkish background.

Specific Feedback Requested

Any critique or comments are highly appreciated.

Technical Details

Is this a composite: Yes Focus stacking
Canon EOSRP, Canon Macro 100mm, f2.8

1 Like

Beautiful flower, Naofumi. Thank you for explaining the meaning of the name for this lovely flower. Perhaps you might enhance the waxen texture you are looking for by using the burning tool on (Photoshop) the background flowers just a bit more. Very nicely seen and captured.

Linda, thank you for your comment. Yes, I darkened the background for the main flower to stand out. I’m afraid I did a little too much and it might look overmanipulated.

Hello Naofumi! It looks and sounds like a really neat flower! I love the yellow color! I don’t have a macro lens but when I’m trying to take a detailed close up of a flower or something small I try to make my f-stop /aperture as small as possible and just adjust the other settings as needed. I noticed your aperture was at f/2 which is pretty wide open. I hope that helps. It’s a great composition!

A gorgeous flower with lovely colors and a suitably lovely OOF BG. I love stacking with a wide aperture – it’s tedious to capture enough focus planes but it can give such a gorgeous BG. It looks like you missed some of the closest petals, on the right – worth another try with this beautiful subject. Sometimes I have more luck with a slightly smaller aperture, even when stacking.

Several years ago I found Zerene Stacker did the best job, although I haven’t looked at the other programs such as Helicon Focus lately. Stacking in PS doesn’t deal well with overlapping objects with shallow DOF, and Helicon wasn’t great at it the last I looked. How Zerene manages it is a mystery, but it does.

Thank you for your comment, Diane. I like shooting with a wide aperture to get soft images. I began to do focus stacking several months ago and currently I’m trying to master the technic, so your comment is very helpful. I’m not sure how far I should put the subject in focus. I sometimes put only the center of the flower in focus.

Yes, leaving some parts of an image soft can be lovely, but many people find that if too much of the FG is soft it can block the viewer entering the image. I try to shoot to get everything sharp then decide later whether to use all the frames or not. But you don’t want to skip over any – just decide later not to use either a set of the nearest or farthest focused frames.