Late Season Poppy

[Bruce Murden]

Two frame merge, one for the background and stem, another for the flower itself.

Nikon D80, ISO 200, 1/100 @ f/7.1 for each (diff focal points), merged in PS.

[Mike Moats]

Hey Bruce, how's it going. Very well done, good light, details,position, and BG. Looks like you hit a home run with this one.

[Gus Cobos]

Very nice Bruce,
I like the colors and details, the soft green background compliments the flower very well...congrats...:cool:

[Julie Kenward]

I really like the detail in the center of the flower and the spiny parts of the stem. Nicely done, Bruce!

[Robert O'Toole]

Fantastic light and details Bruce, I like the extra added details in the stem also.

Good work.

Robert

[Ed Vatza]

Hi Bruce,

I keep coming back to this image. This has to be the fourth time I have started to reply. Each previous attempt seemed to lead to a dead end. So here goes.

Every aspect of this image looks perfect. The flower. The stem. The background. DOF. Sharpness. You name it. All the individual elements look great. And yet for some reason when you put it all together, it (the composition) isn't working for me. And I am having a hard time verbalizing why. For one thing, something feels out of proportion to me. The flower feels too large. The stem feels too small. I also think the size of the flower is made to look even bigger by the tight crop. It might feel more proportional if there is more room around the flower. It also feels very formal and stiff to me. I would like to see the flower entering at a bit more of an angle which could soften the formality of the composition.

But obviously, it looks like I may be the only person to feel this way so take my comments with a grain of salt. :)

[Bruce Murden]

Thanks to all -- especially Ed. I was wondering about the crop myself. This choice was what I thought was the best 8x10 format crop at the time (arbitrarily chose 8x10 for framing purposes), but I worried about the bloom being possibly out of proportion.

Here is the uncropped version. I can get a taller, narrower crop than the 8x10 ratio I used before, which may make the image stronger, or at least not unsettling to some :), but I don't think I want the entire photo as is (4x6 format). It needs to be cropped down some, because the light spots at the bottom are too bright for me (and, I think, hard to tone down), and I think there's more chaos at the bottom.

Thanks for your extra input!