Nursery Orchid

[John Christian]

Went to the nursery to pick up a new subject. The last one had an untimely demise (something about needing water). Starting to play with reflectors, please let me know your thoughts.

Shot on a tripod/backlight with the setting sun/BG a piece of black felt/22" gold reflector to light face/Nikon D80/ISO 100/ Pattern metering/ 105 mm Nikon Micro/f32/.6 sec exposure/lightroom 2.3 used for sharpening, +12 Saturation, +2 Contrast, and cropped for tighter comp/exported to CS2 to resize for website

[John Chardine]

Love the layout and flow of the flowers. The image is sharp and you have lots of DoF. I would give more room at the top and to the right to balance what you have at the left, and I'd remove the white line in the middle right.

[denise ippolito]

John, Nice and sharp image and your composition is lovely with the black BG. I would just tone down a few of the bright spots-Well done.

[Ed Vatza]

Ditto on more room and toning down the hot spots. I photographed that orchid at Longwood Gardens back in January and had the same problem with hot areas.

[Julie Kenward]

Beautiful lighting for the most part. I agree that those back flowers seemed to need a little less light and the front/top flowers could have used a little more. Perhaps angling the reflector more from the floor up? (I'm guessing here...I also have very limited exposure with reflectors.)

Great clarity throughout the orchid and that's not easy. Agree on recropping the image to balance it out a bit more.