Staring down the shaft.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Although the DOF may be a bit shallow for some tastes, I'm a big fan of it when it comes to macro flora. In this image we are looking straight down the pipe of a fresh spiralling hosta sprout. The area at bottom is an open leaf at ground level, with the spiralling stem above rising about 4 inches upwards. I tried a variety of comps in-camera, with this one being my favorite - mainly because anything at left or above was dark earth which kinda took away from the "soft" green feel of the image.

Canon 40D + Tamron 28-75 f2.8 + 36mm extention tube, aperture priority, evaluative metering, 1/200s., f/2.8, ISO 800, -1 EC, natural light, handheld, full frame.

Tips, comments, and suggestions are more than welcome!

[Thomas Herou]

I love super-shallow dofs and this is lovely!

[denise ippolito]

I like the shallow depth of field also. Nice composition with the placement of the curl.

[Christopher Miller]

Nice curl and composition, Daniel. I like the shallow DOF. Looks like it could use some NR.

[OvidiuCavasdan]

Nice composition and tones, interesting point of view. I like it!

[Julie Kenward]

Daniel, there is a bit of noise here. You can either run NR or...you can try pulling the dark tones up a bit with either a curves adjustment or a screen blend mode with reduced opacity. Either way should give you a pristine BG for this lovely image.

[Mike Fuhr]

I really like the DOF here. Colors are also nice. Very well done!

[Anita Bower]

Nice study of Hosta. I like the soft focus, the swirls, the colors.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Thanks all, and Julie for the tip. This plant has since grown more...and it turns out it's a Lily-of-the-Valley!

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Daniel,
I am finally getting around to the softer side......especially when it's very well done. Agree about the NR.....but easy fix and the comp is super!

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Nice one Daniel. I also like this one a lot, I just recently got a macro lens and hope to be able to upload some here for critique.

[Vida van der Walt]

Lovely soft image and ditto nice comp. NR covered.:)