Early Buttercup Trio

[Jared Gricoskie]

Flowers are blooming in the Rocky Mountains. Buttercups have strach crystals below their yellow pigments so they reflect light even brighter then standard yellow flowers.

Darkened the already dark background, I hoped to get the bottom blossom in focus better but didn't get the DOF I hoped.

D300, f9, 1/40, ISO 200, fill flash -0.3, tripod, black reflector to shade.

[John Cooper]

A very nice composition Jared and showing great detail in these buttercups.
I generally like to see more detail in the BG but that's just a personal preference. I would tend to remove the bright spot (? leaf tip) just left of the lower flower.

[Robert O'Toole]

Hi Jared, I also really like the comp. The flowers are nice and show some good detail. The BG info and tech is great.

I dont think 1/40 and F9 with flash a -.3 is fill at this point this would really be flash image or flash as main light image. As John pointed out you do have some flash hot spots.

There are some processing problems but I am not really sure what they are maybe a saturation problem with some underexposure maybe.

Robert

[Jared Gricoskie]

Here's a repost, re-evaulated my post processing, this time I only selectively sharpened the flower centers. I think those starch crystals make for a lot of random detail in the petals that was destracting in the orig, so instead of sharpening to get close to reality I left them more blurred, Cloned out the hot spots, or brought them down a bit.

I just bought Noise Ninja and find unlike other noise reduction software that softens the image (at least with photoshop and Capture), noise ninja is actually sharpens my images AND removes the background noise. Trying to find the balance there with Ninja and selective sharpening.

On the flash, the fill was the setting, not really the technique. Thanks for the critiques, keep em coming.

[Fabs Forns]

Hi JAred, I liked your original post but for the highlights, so your repost took care of that and a big improvement :)

[Mike Moats]

Hey Jared, very nice comp and beatiful color. Second image looks much better. Well done.