Lavender Bee + others.

[Tight Knot]

Thanks Robb. Appreciate it.

Thanks twoboysnmygirl. The sky in number 4 was that colour becuae of clouds and sunset, if I remember correctly. I'll play with the cropping of 6 - 7 and see how that looks.

Thanks flyingember. When you say #1 is too flat, what do you mean? If I remember correctly, I had the camera on 100 ISO, and around a 5.6 f. stop. By flash do you mean a fill flash? Where do you see the bluriness?
#2 - 4 appear under exposed? how would you have exposed them? And why do you feel HDR was not a good choice for those images?
In #2, Unfortunately, I could not get closer to get the branches hanging in, out of the way, or I would have been swimming. I'll have to wait until I get a waterproof case for my camera:mrgreen:.
#5 is blurry, but I guess that's because it is a severely cropped photo, but I agree with you on all you said about the photo.
#6-7, I agree.

Thank you everyone for your input, I appreciate it.

#1
photos start out flat because they are. they're 2D. the most common way to add depth is to add shadows somehow. when you add shadows you know there's something in 3D in the photo because shadows bring out detail. (like with side lighting half the nose is lit and half isn't so it must be 3D) on the focus it may just be the lens is slightly soft. sometimes a photo is soft because it's seen bigger than the quality allows for, sometimes it's on purpose. I had some photos recently which at 4x6 were fine but larger than 8x10 appeared partially out of focus.

#2-4
In these scenes I would have picked your focus item and exposed for it. You want people to focus on that item and your exposure helps for this. With this HDR you ended up with nothing well exposed. your subject, the creek and waterfall, is under exposed

HDR isn't appropriate because it's for times when you have portions of your subject under very different lighting such part in hard shadows and part under bright sunlight to where you'll lose detail in the shadows or highlights. notice I said subject is lit differently. the background being different is fine. in this case your subject is all the same forest lighting with few true variants.

Thanks for the explanations. I always appreciate good critique. Now I understand what you mean by flat, that changes my understanding of photography again. I love it.
The waterfall shots had allot of different lighting and shadows, so I thought I would try an HDR and see how it looked. But looking back at the original raw images, I see what you mean.