Some flowers and stuff

[amolitor]

C&C welcome.

 

[ronlane]

It looks to me like you were still shooting down on the flowers. Would the perspective be better having set the camera on the ground and shooting up at the flowers? I think everything is there for an interesting picture though.

 

[ceeboy14]

This to me became more about the bright back wall than about the flowers and stuff and the stuff was really secondary to the flowers. I did some selective masking to tone down and darken the back wall while doing the opposite for the flowers by given them more color pop and emphasis...

 

[Derrel]

I really like the way the highlights in this photo have been rendered. The shadow play from the iron flower on the white bricks is a delightful detail. The slight diagonal shadow on the wall seems like an important element, yet another clue as to the angle the sunlight was coming in at. But what bugs me, what really prevents this shot from totally singing, is the way the shadowed area is rendered--just too light, too transparent. The flowers across the bottom are nice, but this just doesn't seem to be rendered naturally...it seemed to me to be manipulated a bit too much toward an open, light look, and the way the highlights are wayyyy up there, this just seems,well, "wrong". Not enough contrast between the shadow values and those lovely, bright, delicate highlights on that whitewash. It's not that every shot needs to be rendered in a realistic style, but this shot is very much an observation about light, and here the light just looks like it's been manipulated in such a way that the light does not seem authentic.

 

[amolitor]

This is actually an experiment, which may explain some of your concerns.

I've seen this display for a few weeks now, but it was flat. What it needed, I decided, was a shadow. Since that particular wall is in fact in indirect sunlight all day long, I made myself a shadow. That's a Vivitar 285 and a cardboard box The shadow is thus quite "open". Also, I completely failed to do a few things in post that I meant to do..

Here's a rework based on your various suggestions, and also some stuff I meant to do but forgot:

 

[KenC]

I actually don't see much difference between the original and the last post, but I haven't downloaded them and put them side by side. In any event, I like the composition of this a lot. The shadow line is in just the right place, both relative to the lighter bricks and in intersecting the window. This just wouldn't work without that shadow. I think I'd prefer it without the unpainted part of the wall along the left edge, which just doesn't seem to fit in as far as I can tell.

 

[amolitor]

My changes were fairly minor, the overall structure of the picture is obviously the same.

I liked Chris's take on the wall, so I brought back some of the texture and color in the unpainted sections of brick, I thickened up the shadow a bit to make it more credible per Derrel, and then I tried to make that black metal flower thing pop a bit more. Darker metal, lighter background. The shadow was specifically cast to lead there, since it's an obvious focal point.

Having seen the first one, the edit isn't going to read that much differently, but I like to imagine that the edit would read better if seen by itself.