Hello All,
Please feel free to critique and comment on the pictures below.
Spring fever has hit me and I took the camera into the front yard for some one-on-one.








Peter

At the URL below are photos of flowers taken on my recent visit, about 100 km away.

Four pages of Icons. Best viewing 1600 x 1200

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shebalso/sets/72157607176968919/>

Half as bad...
the page not found error still allowed browsing of your photos.
I found that I could get to your albums and did find it.

We should make an Australian flower expose. Mine are from Adelaide.

Cheers!
Peter

I am also having trouble. Trying to upload another 80 photos to the Toowoomba flower site and I can walk faster than the transfer

Peter
Hope this works
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shebalso/sets/72157607176968919/
Regards to Family
John

Those are great flowers!
The front yard does not have that much latitude but it does allow a little bit of fun.

Peter

#3: I think works quite nicely as is - you could slightly improve it by cropping the top of the frame to eliminate the unopened flower, and half of the right side background.

#1: I'd crop very tightly so that the main flower virtually fills the whole frame (the background is empty and adds nothing) - and I'd crop it "square" to complement the round(ish) symmetry of the flower. Good exposure control.

#2: Of course that leaf in front spoils it. Had that leaf not been an issue, I'd be suggesting a much tighter crop like I suggested for #1.

Saturation appears maybe a little bit overdone, but possibly that's just my personal preference.

I agree with your comment, especially the satuation

Mark mentioned #3 top and right, but I was thinking left side as well to remove dead bud.

I like the breaking in bud in the first, although others may not like that, and on the second don't be afraid to touch and move things in the way or to your liking...

In the first I may have taken another photo removing that bud breaking into the other.

Thanks for the saturation comments.
I will have to check the camera to ensure that the saturation is not "turned up" as I recall having
played with its effects a while ago. I do find that the 20D does a good job on exposure and I rarely
need to touch up with compensation.

Here is a re-cropped #1. I tried the square but found that removing both the stem and the blurred dark background lost the contrast I enjoyed and the removed the nice lines. What do you think of this attempt?




This one works much better as per your suggestions. I did a rough touch-up to remove a distraction you
will easily spot. Some extra time could probablymake the fix much better.



Unfortunately I did not have the room to move around to a better spot with the other flower.

Cheers.
Peter

Just a quick edit, also ran tweak, but was already tweaked by you and working from your web uploaded image...

Maybe a little tight- to get inside the dead buds and keep that aspect- the 4x6 crop was still tight on top, and left too much space to right

you can see what else has changed...

David,
I like how you cleaned up the image. What tool did you use?

Along the same lines, I have taken a few more pictures and cropped more tightly and bordered them in the same manner.

I like the second most, the dreamy out-of-focus look around the edges is real not a-la-photoshop.





Cheers!

Peter

my tweak is still the same one I've used for a while auto levels(usually turned off), highlights/Shadows, warming through color balance, USM(not used if already sharpened), then I hit it with cooling photofilter(yah I know I balance it war earlier, but I can get whites better, and still keep other areas warmed), than a 6% black border(really comes out nice in prints)