Life of a flower

[Peniole]

I'm going here for the birth, life, and death of a flower. It was pretty hard to get being so close to the ground and under 2cm in diameter (hand shot belly down on the ground). C+C particularly cropping please, I hope this works. Feel free to edit this one. Thanks.

14-45mm lens @45mm

EXIF:

1/10 sec
ISO 100
F/5.6

 

[harrisoncj]

The composition needs to be fixed. I would take away most of the room at the top, and get the flower out of the center of the frame.

Also, if you wanted those three flowers to represent birth, life, and death I would change your d.o.f. so that all three of them are in focus.

 

[Peniole]

Thanks, I'll try to increase the depth of field next time, poor lighting, flash was too harsh and didn't want to bump up the ISO too much. Did you mean something like this?

P.S. I also bumped up the saturation and shifted the colour temperature.

 

[harrisoncj]

Yep... It also seems a little underexposed.

 

[LaFoto]

The crop is nice.
The theme is good.
The bokeh of the wood chips on the ground is a bit busy ... and unfortunately the "new-born" belly is not too well to be seen, I am actually only seeing it in your cropped version, I totally overlooked it in the uncropped one and wondered where the circle of life actually was ...

Oh, and Welcome to ThePhotoForum!

 

[Peniole]

Thank you both. Yup the woodchips are a bit disracting, wish I coud have gotten closer to the ground to have sky instead (dunno if that would have worked, it's just so short). Besides shooting raw and adjusting exposure in a raw editor, what would be the best way to adjust minor exposure problems in jpg?

Better?

 

[The_Traveler]

To fill out the theme, I would have tried to get the 'bud' closer into the other flowers (as said above)

 

[fabster]

i like the first crop better, def. fixed the composition problem, but other then that i like the contrast and saturation

 

[Peniole]

Thanks for all the replies, this wasn't as painful as I thought it would be for my first try at something more serious. I'm on my other laptop replying and as looking at the pics I noticed they look different on this laptop (colour wise I mean). This is an older laptop and I haven't run the adobe gamma/colour calibration on this one. Could that be it? For some reason the colours (in the original first post) look better on this laptop even though the newer laptop is a calibrated newer higher res widescreen. Kinda confused here. Any suggestions on getting the calibration right?

EDIT: Sorry it was just my imagination (D'UH moment ) I have hem set up side by side now.
EDIT2: Has anyone tried Vista's built in colour management and profiles, they're awesome and automatically switchable depending on what you're viewing :thumbup:

Thanks again.