Red Columbine

[Bob Miller]

Shot this in my backyard. Wind necessitated the high ISO
Nikon D3s
tripod
1/400 sec at F5.6
ISO1600
105 macro

[Grahame Hamblin]

Now that i like
Grahame

[Valerio Tarone]

Hi Bob, twin flowers goes well together, I ean balance well, althought one is not focused, doesn't matter, like it.

[Mat Bingham]

Composition and colours are very nice. Might be worth cropping out the stork in the top right corner or cloning it out if you are happy doing things like that.

[Jim Bridges]

I have never seen one of these in my area...what a beauty!! I agree about the stem in the top RH corner. I still enjoyed see this very much!

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Bob. These columbines make great photo subjects - they are just getting ready to bloom up here. I like what you are doing here and the way you have positioned the two flowers. Excellent sharpness within your DOF and good detail in the yellows and on the stamens which can easily blow out with this species. I might suggest trying to blend in the dark areas, just below and to the right of the main flower, a little more. As an alternate comp, you might consider cropping from the right to make this more of a vertical presentation - this would eliminate the large stem on the right, but would place both flowers in ROT positions. :S3: Overall, this is very nicely done!

[OvidiuCavasdan]

I like the idea and position of the flowers. Colors are very nice. Maybe using some clamps for positioning the flowers would allowed you to avoid that brown area and make the BG all green, but this is just an opinion. Well done overall.

[Ken Childs]

Hi Bob, Steve covered most of what I would have said so there's no reason to repeat. I really like the idea of the vertical presentation and I also agree with Ovidiu that this would look better with a completely green BG so I thought I'd take a few minutes to play with it in Photoshop. After cropping I took a large, soft brush at 20% opacity and grabbed some of the lighter green from the BG. Without bothering to mask anything, I painted over the brown and black at the bottom and it came out surprising well....not completely green but it did blend fairly well with the rest of the BG. The OP looks good as is but you have a lot options with this shot which is a good situation to have!

[Bob Miller]

Thanks everyone for the comments and suggestions!
Ken.... a special thanks for the suggestion about painting to green.