The Intricacies of a Gerber Daisy Center

[Linda Dulak]

Last summer I bought a potted Gerber daisy to photograph. I never did get some good photos of that plant before the rain ruined the blossoms. However, I've nursed this plant through the winter and with some good grow lights it's blooming again but now inside. I've always been fascinated with the intricacies of the center of this flower and took the time to get some photos of it now. I hope you enjoy and give me any advice for improvement of the image.

D300, 105mm, R200 twin light flash, ISO400, f22, 1/60 sec
Post processing included a bit of adjustment to decrease exposure to preserve reds in conversion to sRGB and some use of content aware healing brush to remove bits of pollen and specular highlights.

[Mitch Haimov]

I like highlighting a portion of the flower rather than making another "seed packet" shot. Here are my two suggestions for how you might improve a similar image (since the subject is waiting at home...):

Off-center composition is good, but would be stronger off-center to the left rather than the right in this case since the shadows go right. Or diffuse the light so there are no shadows. My thought here is that the shadows running out of the frame make it feel cut off.
Either increase the DOF to include the entire center of the flower or reduce it to definately only include a portion--nearly getting the whole thing feels like a miss.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful.

[Anita Bower]

I agree with you about the beauty of Gerber Daisy's and the difficulty of finding an intact one outside. This one is a beauty. Good for you for babying it through the winter!

I love the colors here. That orange is magnificent. Focusing on the center of this flower is a great idea. There are some lovely curly things there.

At f22 I'm surprised more isn't in focus. Maybe backing up a bit, or shooting from above, straight down so the center is a fairly even plane parallel to the lens. Mitchh has some other good suggestions. I find I have to take many shots of subjects like this one to get what I want.

Hope you try again and share.

[Ken Childs]

Hi Linda, Mitch and Anita made some very good suggestions....either go extremely shallow or try to get all of the center in focus. It might be better to move away from the subject to get more DOF and then crop for the desired presentation.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Linda. This is certainly a very colorful flower with a lot of intricate structures in the center. Mitch and Anita have given you some good suggestions to consider. While the front portion of the flower's center is sharp, my eye keeps going to the OOF central portion. IMO, the image would be a lot stronger with both the front and central portions sharp. As suggested above, you may have to change your shooting angle or distance to accomplish this. Also, the petals in the foreground have an oversharpened look - you might want to selectively back off on the sharpening in that area. :)

[Linda Dulak]

Thanks everyone. I've got a few other shots of the flowers and perhaps one of them will make a better image. I had a very difficult time controlling the reds when I converted to sRGB. I had to convert first and then save for the web. If I did it all in one step the reds got blown out all over the place. I'll have to wait to reshoot as the two flowers were relegated to the trash today. But there are buds . . .

Linda