Back Yard Photo

[Layton E Parham]

Bird of Paradise closeup. In my backyard. Canon Eos 1D MarkIV, Canon 24-105 @105 mm, F4, 1/160sec, Iso 400, Manual Mode

[Jeff Parker]

There seems to be a halo on some of the edges. Particularly the top of the blue part where the highlight is.

[Ken Childs]

Hey Layton, you've captured some great colors here and I really like the comp. The focus seems to be all towards the bottom and is very shallow. This is a relatively big subject for a close-up so you if wanted more DOF, you should have been shooting with a much smaller aperture, maybe f16, to get it all in focus. I'm not sure which direction the light is coming from but there are some bright areas that are a bit distracting. If you'd been able to shade the flower or used some fill flash, you probably would have been able to get more even lighting. Since you're in Florida, you should be able to revisit this subject and I'm looking forward to seeing the results. :)

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Layton. Great colors and I like the diagonal comp of the blue section of the flower. The rest of the comp, though, isn't working that well for me - my eye is getting drawn all around by those cool colors, but ending up at a cut petal. I think the comp would be a lot stronger if we could see the tip of the orange petal just below the blue structure. The halos that Jeff noted are quite noticeable, once you first see them, and detract from your image. I'm not sure what is causing those, but if you had used flash, I'd say they were caused by ghosting. Ken has some good suggestions above and since the flower is close at hand, you could do some experimenting. Hope to see some of those results. :)

[Mike Moats]

Hey Layton, great comp and color, and only would wish for a little more DOF to bring in the focus on the whole blue thingy area.