Cactus flower at night

Emja

Emja

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Emma
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So I had a bit of a dilemma last night. Our huge old cactus decided to throw out a flower which it doesn't do every year. These last for only 24 hours so I knew by the time I got home from work today it would be faded, with no time for photography this morning. I only had a reading lamp and an old black t-shirt to work with and have never photographed a flower inside before.. Not a great effort I know, but any feedback welcome!

cactusflower by Em Jay, on Flickr

cactus flower by Em Jay, on Flickr

 
You dont well emja, considering its something that happens only once a year - I think you were lucky to have grabbed it at all. Just a shame you have to wait another year for such a beautiful flower to appear.
 
Well done!

Flower portraits without much background detail often do well cropped to a square format in which they're fairly centrally placed. If you can find the name of your cactus that will make it easier for you to find other good photographs of the same flower.

I note your depth of field is rather shallow, only a few bits of the flower are in focus. That will often happen when you're getting close to a large flower. Obviously your opportunity has gone for another year for this flower, but for other similar flower portraits you could try reducing the aperture. You'll lose a little bit of sharpness in the perfectly focused bits, due to diffraction, but you'll gain more sharpness and detail in other parts. It's a trade off you can experiment with.
 
Particularly like No2 due to the stem just being visible and depicting the bloom attached to something.
 
chris malcolm said:
Well done!

Flower portraits without much background detail often do well cropped to a square format in which they're fairly centrally placed. If you can find the name of your cactus that will make it easier for you to find other good photographs of the same flower.

I note your depth of field is rather shallow, only a few bits of the flower are in focus. That will often happen when you're getting close to a large flower. Obviously your opportunity has gone for another year for this flower, but for other similar flower portraits you could try reducing the aperture. You'll lose a little bit of sharpness in the perfectly focused bits, due to diffraction, but you'll gain more sharpness and detail in other parts. It's a trade off you can experiment with.
Click to expand...
I'll certainly try a square crop. I was experimenting with the dof, but I struggled with the lighting on a few of the other shots. so had to abandon them as parts were very overexposed, but changing this in pp led to loss of other detail. Thanks for taking time to offer advice!
 
Emja said:
Thank you Doug. I would have like to bring out the stem more, but when I went for a longer exposure the black t shirt (with all its creases) became very clear, too. it was very late at night...I needed more time to experiment!
Click to expand...

If you're editing rom RAW you could bring up thhe black level to exclude the T-shirt. That might enable you to lift the stem while keeping a black background.
 
That wants printing and framing at least A4 size and hanging on a wall. Sell any additional prints to local flower shops.

Great art image.........

ps you have to shake the black background to prevent the creases showing during exposure.
 
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Our Cactus had the same flowers a couple of weeks ago, did not get time to photo before they where past their best. However, it has another couple of flowers just about to open.
 
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