Gone to Seed

[Ziggy]

Like most thinks in Ohio now.

[Shadowman]

Nicely composed.

[DanK]

I agree--nicely composed, and crisp detail. However, a problem with milkweeds is that they tend to grow in dense vegetation, and it is very hard to have enough DOF for the pod and seeds without getting a distracting amount of background detail. I have thrown out most of my milkweed shots taken in the wild and shoot them mostly indoors for this reason. However, they are so delicate that getting them indoors takes care. In this case, you could use postprocessing to dry to blur the twigs in the background.

[Kodiak]

…I have thrown out most of my milkweed shots taken in the wild and shoot them mostly indoors for this reason.…

I, for one, would not ever consider throwing this one away! Nice shot Jim!
I love the colour palette. …if only it could have been possible to add more
bokeh to the background…

[DanK]

I…if only it could have been possible to add more
bokeh to the background…

yes, that was my point as well. I do think that some blurring in postprocessing could help. Glenn, who posts here often, is a master at doing this with Lightroom's adjustment brush. I can't do much with that, so I use photoshop.

I happened to be working on a milkweed shot, which is not a great one, but it illustrates what I mean. Here is the image out of lightroom, with some blurring using the adjustment brush:



Then I moved it to photoshop, created a rather crude selection, and applied both gaussian blur and some darkening via levels to the background:



Your photo has a more complex selection problem because of the flowers in the foreground that I assume you would want to keep in focus, but I think you could try something like this.

[IzzieK]

I like the composition, Ziggy...very delicate...