My first attempt of flower shots with the Canon 450D & 55-250 II lens

[Jwar1976]

Hi all,

I done my first shoot with my new 55-250 lens earlier at the Norwich Plantation Garden & took around 90 photos, for a first attempt I think they have come out pretty good but of course there is plenty of room for improvement. I did try to upload the pictures to my own gallery on here, but it kept on giving me an error about the picture being too large & I am not sure on how to resize . I ended up posting the pictures in their natural size on Flickr & hope that the mods do allow me to keep the link posted on here, for basic feedback of the pictures taken.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/123892097@N03/sets/72157644239307781/

 

[Bill19]

I would say try experimenting more with your composition and position. A lot of them are very central, which often isn't the best look for photo, try looking up the rule of thirds ( and there's loads of other composition guides as well) and take some shots working with that. But thats not to say that you can't sometimes place things centrally and break those rules, but for me it only works sometimes, for examples if there's a symmetrical element to the photo. Also a lot of them are taken from a similar angle to what we would usually see flowers anyway, from above and to the side, try getting down to there level (or even below there level!) for a more interesting shots.
A few look a bit over exposed but I think on most of them you have done a good job with exposure, which is quite difficult on some of those flowers because of there reflective petals. My favourite shot is this one, with the foreground petal being a third along the picture giving a nice composition, its well exposed, and because its a close up and down on its level its just more interesting than a lot of the others.

 

[Jwar1976]

I would say try experimenting more with your composition and position. A lot of them are very central, which often isn't the best look for photo, try looking up the rule of thirds ( and there's loads of other composition guides as well) and take some shots working with that. But thats not to say that you can't sometimes place things centrally and break those rules, but for me it only works sometimes, for examples if there's a symmetrical element to the photo. Also a lot of them are taken from a similar angle to what we would usually see flowers anyway, from above and to the side, try getting down to there level (or even below there level!) for a more interesting shots.
A few look a bit over exposed but I think on most of them you have done a good job with exposure, which is quite difficult on some of those flowers because of there reflective petals. My favourite shot is this one, with the foreground petal being a third along the picture giving a nice composition, its well exposed, and because its a close up and down on its level its just more interesting than a lot of the others.

Thank you very much for the constructive criticism & opinion on positioning as really didn't think about going in from different angles like below level for shots, will try them next time I visit somewhere like that.

 

[RedRobin]

A tricky subject to photograph and a great start.

However, in my opinion, if you shoot RAW and post-process them a bit to lose some of the blown out highlights on some and sharpen them (always sharpen as very last final step, not earlier) you'll then see a great improvement.

 

[Jwar1976]

Sorry but you lost me after shooting Raw, so I had to google it. Thankfully I have been shooting in Raw+ L, & do have lightroom, so will look into editing those CR2 files. Thanks for the advice