Red Trillium.

[Daniel Cadieux]

In a forested area close to home there is a fairly large trillium patch that blooms every year during mid-May. This patch easily contains a thousand flowers or more, mostly the white variety (Trillium grandiflorum - Ontario's official flower), but sprinkled here and there are found these red ones (Trillium erectum). They are outnumbered by a margin of about 50-1, but they add a nice splash of deep red colours within the sea of white flowers and green leaves and ferns...quite the sight!

Choosing the right camera settings is the "easy" part when confronted with such a sight...choosing the right flower within the right surroundings/background void of distracting elements, and then composing correctly without introducing other unwanted distractions is the tough part! One can easily spend ten times as much time scouting and choosing than actually photographing!

Canon 30D + Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 lens @60mm, aperture priority, evaluative metering, 1/200s., f/5, ISO 800, +0.3 EC, natural light, handheld, FF, a few blemishes on the leaf digitally repaired.

[Chris Ober]

Isolation of large groups like you describe is extremely difficult at times. You did well! I like the leaf anchor here, the fact you got all the right parts in focus and still maintain a fairly even background. I do wish the background leaves, mid-stem were gone -- it would help keep the flower from looking like it didn't have a stem as much I think.

[bhavya joshi]

I like position and Sharpness of flower nice colour and detail.. also..I am also think, little bit blurring the BG more..:S3:

[jack williamson]

Daniel you have acheived excellent detail and sharpness handheld at 1/200! The red seems perfectly

saturated.

Jack

[OvidiuCavasdan]

Very nice details and texture on the petals. Red looks great on green . I like the BG as is. Wished the oof darker green stem(?) on right was not there. Tighter composition would also work well. Well done handheld.

[Allen Sparks]

Hi Daniel, I like this as is. wonderful details in crimson and nice presentation of the larger plant and its environment.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Daniel. The flower seems to jump out from the background! Outstanding sharpness for hand holding a "non-macro" lens. I like the even light and the exposure is perfect. Very well done.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Daniel,
These are tough in the field....because of all the reasons you mentioned. Tweaking a few bits in the BG will help but I think you handled this diffficult situation very well and this gives you a pretty good idea on why I carry BG's into the field!:bg3: Very natural looking processing too!

[Mitch Haimov]

Outstanding job handholding, Daniel. This is a fine image as is and your digit repair is completely invisible, at least at this image size. As mentioned by others, you nailed the color & saturation.


Choosing the right camera settings is the "easy" part when confronted with such a sight...choosing the right flower within the right surroundings/background void of distracting elements, and then composing correctly without introducing other unwanted distractions is the tough part! One can easily spend ten times as much time scouting and choosing than actually photographing! Ain't that the truth!