THEME: Raindrops

[Nancy Bell]

After a much needed rain I ran outside to capture some raindrop images before the raging summer heat returned and dried them away. This is some kind of lovely pink summer lily that just appeared in my landscaping, and seems to be in all the yards around here. This image is mostly an in-camera effect, using a very shallow DOF to selectively focus on parts of the stamens and a few raindrops, leaving the rest of the flower and raindrops to be softly appearing shapes and color. I used a very reduced opacity layer of fractalius to add just a bit of outline to the flower.

[Judy Howle]

Beautiful capture Nancy!

[Cheryl Slechta]

Lovely, lovely, Nancy. It's sharp right where it needs to be and I like the shallow DOF and bokeh

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Nancy,

Greetings. The shallow dof is interesting. My eye keeps looking toward the central drop of the three in a row toward the middle bottom for focus. Maybe a crop from the bottom would pull attention upward? Thanks for posting.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Wendy Kates]

This is stunning, Nancy. I love the focus on the stamen and the raindrops.

[Nancy Bell]

Michael, I see what you mean about that one drop and pulling the interest upwards.
Thank you everyone for your comments! Always glad for feedback since I sit in my little computer room and wonder how these images look to others !

[Jackie Schuknecht]

The colours and drops are lovely Nancy. I really like the sweeping curves of the one petal and stamens to the left. I might crop some off the left as I feel it is taking interest away from the center of the flower, which is the focal point to me.

[Anita Bower]

This is a lovely composition--the curving lines repeated in the stamen and the petals is pleasing. I like the crop and the colors and the circles of bokeh. They all work together nicely.
I would have put the sharp focus on the larger water drop mentioned by Michael. Because of it's prominence it draws attention. I had to look carefully to find the water drops that are actually in focus.

[Mitch Carucci]

I like the angular shapes of the stamens contrasted with the soft round shape of the droplets.

[Nancy Bell]

Thank you everyone! Good points about cropping. And Anita, I agree with you about that particular raindrop and didn't realize it wasn't until I had downloaded the images.

[Anita Bower]

Thank you everyone! Good points about cropping. And Anita, I agree with you about that particular raindrop and didn't realize it wasn't until I had downloaded the images.

Nancy: Focusing on something that tiny is something I struggle with. Even using Live View, I too often have the wrong thing in focus.