Spotted Rockrose

[Jerry van Dijk]

From my visit in May to Extremadura, Spain. Although the area is famous for its vultures, it is a wildflower paradise too, but only in spring. The dehesas and steppes are in full bloom then, only to dry out completeley in summer.
This Spotted Rockrose (Xolantha guttata) was a fairly common species, but one of my favorites. If you like to see more, I've added a whole Extremaduran wildflower gallery on my website (there are some vultures too :w3!).

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 200mm f/4 micro, handheld, ISO-100, f/6.3, 1/100.
Minor PP work.

[Jonathan Ashton]

I like the shot very much and as soon I have written this I am off to visit your web site!
The flower and background are excellent, I like the OOF stem at the bottom, equally I like the OOF bud top right of the flower and the stem leading up to the flower. I have a slight reservation over the triangular bit and the straight bit at approximately 5 o'clock on the flower. I suspect your sharpening is pretty well spot on but I would be tempted to see if a little more would be beneficial at the junction of the purple and yellow parts of the petals.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Thanks Jonathan! The straight bit on the petal is probably caused by the minute spiders thread (you have to look really closely to see it) that's pulling part of the petal to the right. Funny I didn't notice this in the field (it was quite windy, so I was too busy keeping everything within my DOF :S3:). I'll look into the purple-yellow junction. I've noticed that the contrast/clarity settings had a lot of influence on this, so I'll play around with it.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Jerry. This is a very nice example of how a shallow DOF can work very well in Macro (said the guy who usually likes more, rather than less DOF :S3:). Nice sharpness within your flower and I like the comp and the dreamy background. I would suggest removing the strand of spider web on the right just below the flower - it's just visible enough to catch my eye and it doesn't seem to fit well with the very soft background - a very small tweak to a beautiful image.

[Norm Dulak]

Hi Jerry.

This is a very pleasing image in all respects. Well done. A sole and very minor suggestion would be to crop some off the bottom, just eliminating the pointy leaf or shoot to the right of the main stem. But I like it very much as is.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Thanks Norm! Your suggestion could work very well. I would be inclined to crop some from the top and side too then, to get a square crop.