Flowers Trio

[Desmond Chan]

105mm hand-held; ISO 800 f8 1/125s. Manual exposure mode.

Cropped. Decided to convert it to B&W for no other reason but to make it look...different :)

Still, can't decide on this one and so would like to see how the committee think about it.


Thank you very much !!

[Christopher Miller]

I think it looks very nice, Desmond. The white on black is very eye-catching. I can see some noise in the leaves and the left-hand flower that I would remove. Well done!

[Dave Leroy]

Interesting idea Desmond. It looks very nice. I like the three flowers, but with the third one slightly oof does distract a bit. Looking forward to the next one. Dave

[Julie Kenward]

I agree that the flower on the far left is a bit too OOF - I think at this point I'd consider taking it out. I would also like to have seen a little more detail in the stem and leaves - or not at all. As is, I am straining to see if they matter and what they are. What I DO love about the image is the overall composition. Nice angle that the stem is coming into the frame and the leaves are all nicely inside the same frame. It's also an excellent choice of flower for a b&w conversion - freesia, isn't it?

[Mike Moats]

Hey Desmond, agree on the OOF flower, clone it out. I like the moody lighting and comp.

[Chris Starbuck]

Desmond,

I like the group of flowers, and your basic composition. The B&W conversion works well for me. But I have to agree with the others that having one flower noticably OOF while the other two are sharp detracts from the overall presentation. I also agree with Jules that the leaves/stems are ambiguous, and need to be either present or absent. Here's an alternative to just removing the OOF flower for your consideration.

Having experienced (many times) the frustration of just not being able to achieve sufficient DOF to get everything I wanted sharply focused due to the distance between parts of my subject, sometimes a good solution is to go in the other direction: go for a very shallow DOF, placed on a key part of the subject, and let the "supporting actors" become just suggestions of repeating shapes.

The accompanying modification of your image illustrates this idea. Here are the details of how I got there:
1. I made a rough oval selection around the center of the center flower, with a large feather, inverted the selection (to select everything else), then applied a small gaussian blur (radius ~2)
2. Next I restored the previous selection, inverted it again (so now it's selecting the center of the middle flower), added a curves layer (the selection becomes the mask) and increased the contrast on that small area of focus to make it stand out a little more (mainly brightened the whites); it loses a little detail, but I think it pulls the viewer's attention a little more
3. Then I lightened the leaves & stems a bit to provide a little more support for the flowers; this was a bit complicated, and there are surely easier ways to get there):
a. duplicated the green channel (since it's monochrome, all the color channels are the same and any one would work)
b. inverted the duplicate channel
c. applied a levels adjustment to the above channel, with the black point raised to ~113, in order to make the flowers (in the channel) as close to black as possible without making the leaves & stems too dark
d. loaded the above channel as a selection, then added another curves layer (with no modification of the curve), and set the blending mode to screen; this lightens the leaves & stems a bit with minimal effect on anything else
4. Finally, I cropped a bit tighter, carefully equalizing the spaces between the flowers and the frame edges to the left, right, and top, in order to place the flower group in a more dominant position; I kept the original aspect ratio

Just food for thought; as always, it's your art and your opinion is the one that matters.

[Desmond Chan]

Thanks everyone !

The oof flower on the left is my concern, too.

Chris, I like your idea of blurring the flower on the right. Never thought of that :o I personally prefer to have all the three flowers there. Cloning out the flower on the left is another good suggestion but it seems to me it also weakens the composition. And thank you, Chris, for sharing your methods !