Critique Orchid

I think there are several things going on here.

I think the image is slightly overexposed as a whole - perhaps half a stop or so.

In addition, I think there is vignetting in the area outside the bigger circle below, and an excess of light in the area of the smaller circle. (Was there illumination coming in from above?)


NOT MY IMAGE - andrewwright4 orchid - 15527288751_b326e9a0fa_c marked up
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

This is what I got when I reduced the exposure by half a stop and brought the light level down inside the smaller circle and up outside the larger circle.


NOT MY IMAGE - andrewwright4 orchid - 15527288751_b326e9a0fa_c edit
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

There are obviously taste issues as to exactly what one prefers.
 
Thanks for that Nick. It was lit by flash, bounced off the ceiling, I did wonder whether to post another picture taken at the same time with less exposure, but thought it looked grainy, like the way you edited it, what program did you use?.
 
Thanks for that Nick. It was lit by flash, bounced off the ceiling, I did wonder whether to post another picture taken at the same time with less exposure, but thought it looked grainy, like the way you edited it, what program did you use?.

I used Lightroom 5. I don't know how familiar you are with Lightroom, but as well as having an (adjustable) facility to tackle vignetting, it has a Radial Filter tool which I used for the smaller area in your image. I'm finding Radial Filters very useful these days, especially for some of my flower images. If anyone is interested I could write something about them and show some examples (in a new thread I think rather than risk taking your thread way off topic).

I'm having an interesting time with grain at the moment. I pretty much always use natural light for plant photos and given relatively low light levels on overcast days, and also breeze, I'm finding I'm using ISO 800 a lot, and I've been experimenting with slightly higher ISOs. I don't much like using luminance noise reduction because of loss of detail in images that often start out none too detailed, so some of my recent (no luminance noise reduction) plant images have been quite grainy in smooth background areas, especially as I often under-expose, and bringing up under-exposed images increases the grain. I can't decide how much I care about the grain. I think as much as anything I'm concerned about what other people might think about it - for my part I don't really mind too much, up to a point. I think toleration (or not) of grain is a very personal thing.
 
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I'm going through a 'choose it' time at the moment as far as editing goes, I've been watching the lightroom tutorials on Digital Camera discs, just bought a Mac Book and looking at Photoshop elements, or LR.
I will be trying some more of the same subject tonight but using my Nikon 35mm f1.8 lens, rather than the Sigma 17-70mm macro capable lens. Just to see the difference.
I do prefer natural light personally as well, but as I am still young enough to work, only just, I am having to use artificial lighting now the nights are drawing in.
The radial filters thread would be interesting, I try to keep with your posts in other topics, as I find them interesting.
 
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A lot of what follows is very much personal taste Andy, so please take this as "For What It's Worth". Your tastes very probably vary; I know for a fact that many people's tastes do compared to mine! And that's fine by me. :D

So, FWIW, I do like the overall "shapes" of the compositions in #1, #2 and #4, but for my taste the use of a large aperture of f/2.8 for all of these only really works for the second image. So little is in focus in the first one that my overall impression is of an image that is out of focus. Actually, I can see that the some of the left hand pink flower and some of the stem to its right, and a very small part of the opening flower in front of it is in focus, but that isn't enough to make the image cohere, for my eyes, especially since the non-sharp ? sepals of the opening flower cut across and block off part of the flower whose stamen is in focus. In the last image there are two flowers in focus, but again my is drawn away from them by the out of focus buds and flower below and to the left of them. In the third image, also on the left there is an out of focus bud obscuring the centre of a flower that looks like it may be in in focus from the tiny part of it that is visible. And on the right in the third image there is an in focus bud on the left that is cut off by the edge of the frame, which sits uneasily to my eye.

So these comments have to do with a combination of dof and composition. FWIW I use various apertures for close-ups of flowers, down to and including f/32. I never use f/2.8, because I don't have it available, so the smallest aperture I use is f/4 to f/5.6, depending on focal length (and yes, I use a zoom lens not a prime), and I don't often use that small an aperture. I'm more often around f/8 to f/13 or so. Even with f/32, depending on the configuration of the subject and the background, the background may be thrown quite a long way out of focus.

In general, as a rule of thumb, I try (it's not always possible of course) to not to have an out of focus element of the subject that appears to be nearer to the camera than the parts of the subject that are in focus. Where that isn't possible, I prefer to make the nearer-looking out of focus elements as unobtrusive as I can make them.

A last thing on the composition front, I would at least get rid of the tiny nib at the bottom of the third image to the left of the stems, and I would probably have cropped the bottom of the image to remove the downward pointing bud that is truncated by the bottom edge of the image.

The white balance looks very different between the first two images. The first one looks rather cold (blue) to me, as indeed do #3 and #4. I much prefer the colours in #2, which is all round my favourite image of this set. As to whether the colours are true to life of course I have no idea. To be honest, as long as the colours in an image don't look positively impossible/silly/overcooked or whatever, that is, as long as the look broadly credible (as in "they might have looked like that"), then I'm not really bothered if they actually looked like that on the day.

Do you use a grey card when shooting in natural light? I have found this make a huge difference to colour renditions. I don't always use the grey card value, although I often do, but even if I don't it usually provides a pretty good starting point. And in some cases it makes sense of colours that I simply can't get to look right and/or nice by playing around with the sliders. (btw, do you shoot RAW or JPEG? Grey card works fine for JPEG as well as RAW, but it seems to me that, at least in Lightroom and I suspect with other software too, it is possible to make much finer adjustments to white balance manually if working with a RAW image.)

I hope there is something useful or at least something worth thinking about in all this, even if our tastes (e.g. about dof) are rather different. :)
 
I much prefer the 1st composition in the 2nd batch although, as Nick highlights, the DoF is a bit shallow and the focal point is in the wrong place IMO. It's also a bit cold (especially compared with the others in the set), but I think Nick's provided much more sound advice than I could on these matters. Anyway, that was my favourite of the lot purely for compositional reasons :)
 
I am pleased with the comments especially from Nick, originally I started out trying to mimic something I saw in a magazine utilising Dof, it rapidly became obvious it wouldn't work, but I was/am pleased with the results, in answer to Nicks question re the grey card I have never used one, but I do have one inside the back cover of a book, so will have a go. The colours in the second image are the most true, the shots were taken in my back garden with the orchid against a magnolia painted house wall. The Dof thing worked in my other post named Chilli, this plant covered a larger area front to back so I did get the effect I was looking for. Lots of fun anyway, will keep at tit so to speak. I thank Nick and Timmy for there comments.
 
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