White Orchids On A Red Field

oldhippy · Jul 31, 2016

Natural lighting, red cutting board at kitchen window. Full manual, hand held.

_DSC3179-Edit-Edit-Edit by ed brown, on Flickr

Tim Tucker · Jul 31, 2016

Ah, sorry, going to be a poop again...

Look at the green stalk in the lower right half of the image, it works. The composition works and I like it.

But the background does not work, except against the stalk. The trouble with the flowers is that they are white, and the processing has exaggerated the texture/contrast. Shaded white is grey. So you are showing mainly grey against highly saturated red. Except around the stalk the red is coming forward so strongly that it's trying to be in front of the flowers. The whole relationship between foreground and background is sort of equalised to my eyes, and I have trouble trying to visualise the relationship I know it's meant to be, if you see what I mean. I also find the red so saturated that it makes the flowers look grey in contrast. (N.B. The problem is with the 'tone-mapping' as well as you've presented the flower and the background with the same scale of brightness, almost exclusively in the mid-tones. There is no real separation except in colour, and the red comes forward. I've tried this myself, flowers against a saturated red and you can make it work. But you need to keep the red background separated by giving it a lower scale of brightness - making it darker.)

Just as an exercise, and not presented as correct, I've toned down the saturation of the background, reduced it's scale of brightness (made it a darker range of tones than the foreground instead of the same as the foreground) and increased the level of white in the flowers to see what happens: