Thanks for the feedback, John. Much appreciated. Mike provided some feedback on one of my earlier posts regarding seeking the best background and I have taken it to heart. I still get a lot of images where the background isn't quite what I wanted. In this case when I saw this liolet growing with an inch or two of I tree trunk, I felt pretty confident that the background would turn out well/
Hey Ed, a nice job onthe whites as they are hard to balance with a darker BG. Its good that you thinking more on the BG's as they are really important in the overall image, you did well here.
Good whites and background. Although I'm usually a wide open flower photog, in this case, a little more DOF would have made the petal borders sharper.
Good compo!
Hi Ed,
Like the BG you chose.....but as you know I'm a more DOF guy. I spend more time on BG's in macro than I probably do on the actual subject. Once you find a nice subject.......even that can be ruined by a poor BG so the fact that Mike has you now thinking about it is a huge plus. If I may make a recommendation (as i will be forcing myself to also do this)......once composed.....take the shot at varied f stops.......from 2.8 (I'm never here) to 32......decide which one works best at home,
Roman
Thanks for the critiques. As always, I really appreciate the feedback and will try to utilize it in future forays.
Roman, I do generally try several different f-stops but I don't often go from wide open to fully stopped down. And of the two extremes, I am more likely to drift toward the wide open end of the continuum. I find that I generally shoot in the f/8 to f/16 range outdoors. When I was shooting store-bought flowers in the house bak in the winter/early spring, I did very often shoot f/22. Some of those exposures were taking up to 10 seconds. I liked how they turned out but that was on a tripod and I was able to control the background a lot more.