What do you think of this Flower Shot?

[s162216]

Took this recently in my school library with a Zenit EM and a 3x teleconverter with a Helios 44M and Kodak Ultra 400 ISO film. Also used a Vivitar 225 flash with the lightsensor thing so it didn't look too harsh.

What do you think? I have done a fair amount of macro of flowers but most are on slides and I currently don't have a scanner that can do them. Only took this on print film as it was what I had loaded at the time when I mentioned I liked taking pictures like this to the librarian who held the purple book behind as a background.

I am never using Jessops for enlargements again. First they tried to charge me £8 for a 12x8 of this with a 3 DAY wait!:thumbsdown: (Eventually convinced them the price was wrong, it was £3.50) Then they are white dots like you can see on the picture that were not in the original 7.5x5 print and a mysterious fog has appeared on the right side that was not there either. Any idea what that is?

 

[EOS_JD]

Background is distracting and it's not a particularly interesting shot of the flower - too much going on and the shadows are still pretty harsh.

 

[CGeezer]

I had a little play with your photo but I'm not sure if it improves it a great deal or not

 

[s162216]

The reason for the harsh shadows is the scanner - when I scanned it in it looked nothing like the original print and I had to boost up the saturation and contrast a bit to stop it looking so dull unlike on the print but it messed up the shadows. When I stopped the lens down for DOF preview the book looked out of focus and gave a nice purply white background. I tried framing just the main flower but Iit was beyond my min focal point so I ahd to compromise.

I do have some better shots on slides but as I said I don't have a scanner that can do them yet so they will have to wait. I actually have just sent off a roll of Velvia 50 to be processed which includes some taken with my new Vivitar Series 1 70 - 210mm in macro mode with a plain light blue background to make it a little less distracting.

 

[sbowler579]

Its all in the background with flower shots, keep it plain and you wont go wrong.

 

[n1kcy]

I also don't like the purple background. I would also say the flash is too bright. Good try though, we only learn by experimenting.

 

[s162216]

The flash is a bit of guesswork as the nearest distance on the scale is 1.5m which says to use f22, but I was focusing at approximately 0.6m so I took that as f32 and then added on 3 stops for the teleconverter. I don't have a meter that measures flash.
Like I said before the scanner does not help as when scanned with the default settings it looks nothing like the original print. I upped the saturation quite a bit to make it look less dull and increased the contrast slightly.