Ratibida

[Katherine Enns]

I am never sure about posting here....is this good enough? To make matters worse this is a new camera for me, I moved up to a Canon EOS 5D Mark II AND I am married to Bruce Enns. Thats three strikes right there. Anyway, I prob should be in Eager to Learn still, but I'd like to know if this crop is ok. More green wasnt in the cards, is it too soft. Very hard to shoot this without blowing it out. Wish Art Morris could repeat his instructions on never blowing your lights out again....Comments welcome, of course.

This was shot from below at English Bay, Vancouver, a couple of days ago
ISO 200
75 mm
f/20
1/160 Sec
EF24-105 mm

[Ken Childs]

First, let me say that you should never worry if your pic is "good enough" to be posted. We post pics because we want suggestions on how to improve, not because we think our work is already great. :) If you feel more comfortable posting in the ETL forum, that's OK.

The first thing that jumps out at me when I look at this shot is that the colors seem oversaturated. The blue sky seems too blue and the flowers look too yellow and hot. These are things that can be fixed during editing. Also, it's a bit busy, at least for my tastes. I feel you would have been better off seperating out 1 to 3 flowers and shooting just those. Unless you're shooting a field full of colorful blooms, generally you're better off limiting the shot to a main subject that's easy for you and the viewers to focus on.

As to the crop on this shot, I would go in much tighter, removing 1/2 to 2/3 of the lower part of the flower stalks.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Kat,

If you are comfortable....posting here is never a problem and you will get some excellent advice from the participants here!......will take the learning curve up quickly!

Groups of flowers are very difficult to pull off.....because as Ken mentioned above.....getting 1-3 isolated is tough enough.....more than that becomes extremely challenging! I find that most succesful group flower images are either arranged.....or people use shallow DOF and get one in focus with falloff on the others and BG. Just participating here will help you improve what you see compositionally and give you ideas. I still struggle with shallow DOF compositions and I've done this for quite a while! Good news is and I highly recommend taking the approach......bracket with the DOF! Choose which one you like best when you get home! If a composition catches your eye......work it! Different angles and different apertures. It would not be uncommon for me to take 200 images of that group of flowers if that is what caught my eye! Working a subject that intrigues you is the best advice I can give ........participating here will only speed up your learning curve!
I'm not saying to not participate in ETL......just that there is a great bunch of macro shooters here all very qualified to give some excellent advice and best of all....we are all here learning too!

[Katherine Enns]

ok, thanks. Excellent advice, especially re composition relating to selecting a simple subject. I have noticed that shots of my beds just dont cut it, for the reasons you state, Roman. Believe it or not the sky is this blue and ratibida is that yellow, in Vancouver. Its at sea level, obv. and the colors saturate naturally. I have pulled it back a bit, and tried to simplify, so here is what I came up with.