Mother's Day orchid

[AlwaysOnAuto]

My wife received this orchid from our son and daughter-in-law yesterday in anticipation of Mother's Day today.

[Wavelength]

beautiful...as serene as a Mother's love

[Shadowman]

Nice capture.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Alan,

Good focus and DoF, but there are a couple of things I'd have addressed if I had shot this;

It is about 1/2 to 2/3 stop under exposed, so this could be recovered in PP.
Also, I would have cloned out and blurred a few of the surrounding petals to simplify the composition.

HTH, Dave

[DanK]

Hi Alan,

I agree with Dave. You got good DOF, and you captured the delicate texture. However, it's busy with some distracting detail--a common problem with orchids because of how they grow bunched up. In addition to being underexposed, the lighting is a little too uneven for my taste.

To illustrate this, I removed some of the detail, as Dave suggested. I didn't do it by cloning, as he suggested. I just selected the two main flowers, inverted the selection, and blacked the selected area out with a levels adjustment. I then did some tonality adjustments to brighten the image, and I did a bit of burning and dodging to even out the lighting. Not a polished job, but I think it illustrates what I was thinking about. If you are bothered by having edits posted this way, I apologize--tell me and I will take it down.

Dan

[IzzieK]

+1 to Dave comments and Dan's edit.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Thanks for the inputs everyone. Sorry it's been a while since I posted this.
I guess Tiny Pics is having a problem....

[AlwaysOnAuto]

I resized the file and Tiny Pics appears to like it.
This is a second try at shooting the orchid taken this morning.