Spring flowers by a newbie

[ClearBlueDaze]

Yeah I know, more flowers by a newbie. I appreciate any suggestions you may have for taking better shots.

Thank you all for your help, suggestions, and encouragement.

Beth

 

[WesternGuy]

Nice shots - not that bad for someone starting out - you said you were a newbie. Some things to consider - could you please number your images as this makes it a lot easier for a reviewer to refer to them. Watch the cropping - in the last two, you have cropped off some of the petals - most folks, including me, like to see the whole flower. The first one and parts of the third and fourth ones look a little soft, this is probably a DOF thing or a focus thing, so be careful about the focussing you are using - you should get the whole blossom in focus - and the aperture because this has a direct effect on how much of the flower is in focus, particularly when you shoot them from a bit of an angle as you did the last one. My 0.02¢ FWIW.
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WesternGuy

 

[ClearBlueDaze]

Thank you thank you! thank you!!!

 

[Joel_W]

Interesting set. WesternGuy gave you some solid advice that will really help you move up to the next step.

Pic #1, while you have the whole flower in the frame, it's dead center, which is not the most pleasing position. I would have also enlarged the flower somewhat to lessen the amount of the background visible. And while the background is OOF, the strong white/black vertical lines is very distracting, and thus competes with the flower for the viewers attention.

Pic #2 is a solid, macro image. Nicely exposed, and the color saturation is perfect on my monitor.

Pics #3 & 4 both suffer from the same exact short comings; flower dead center, too large for the frame as you cut off some petals, and parts of the flowers are not in focus. Behind the focus point generally works as it blends into the background, but before the focal point is much more difficult to pull off.

Over all, for your 1st efforts, you're making some very nice progress. Force yourself to use your LCD both before and after each exposure to really see what you have. Use the histogram. Re-take as necessary. Believe, I do this all the time, and re-shoot many images. I still bracket f stops as DOF is hard for me to really see on my 3 inch LCD.