Yellow flower

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Why is it that I have to remind myself that not all of a picture needs to be in focus?
I tried changing the aperture for this one to see what kind of bokeh I'd get.
Micro Nikkor 55 2.8 on my Nex-7.
I just looked at Zak's crystal ball pictures and forgot that there are still places with cold temps.
It was 77* here today.
We haven't had much of a winter I'm afraid.


SOOC jpeg.

[Shadowman]

Whenever I try to follow your line of thinking I have to remind myself to get closer. Nice shot.

[Wavelength]

I wonder why you placed your subject at the centre of the image? it would have been better, the second flower is more oof, but fully within the frame. Again the triangular flat part at the lower bottom corner is a distraction ....

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Thanks John.
Nandakumar - I was concentrating on the one flower, figuring the other would be out of focus anyways so wasn't necessary to be in the frame. I also was trying to get the leaves in the foreground included. They are really OOF.
Did you look at it in lytebox(?) or click on it to see it full size?

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Here's another shot taken just before the first one in my post.
How's this work?

[Wavelength]

Alan, in lightbox it looks better; A still shallow DOF /wider aperture is needed? in this new input also the pipe is a distraction.... if you are very keen on showing sooc only, must try to avoid including such things in frame for better appeal; further yellow being a bright color, looks burned when sunlight falls directly upon it..I feel so; I am interested to know responses of other members here

[JBW]

Just o confuse the issue. I like the layered focus effect. To my eye the main flower is not centered. I would go with either more or none at all of the top flowers.

And for the record your high is lower than our daytime low.
B.

[Shadowman]

Nicely suspended, you are getting the bokeh you were after, perhaps get closer to eliminate the angular fence at bottom right.

[Geoff F]

With the first image, Alan, the closest petals are noticeably out of focus. I always think you can get away with some distant areas being a bit soft but you really need the closest parts to be sharp.

The second version has overcome the softness but at the expense of having a somewhat distracting background; although a bit of cropping and selectively toning down a few problem areas would produce an improvement.

When faced with this situation I opt for a balance in my aperture setting or, if there isn't too much wind movement, do a merge of two shots with different focus points which should produce the desired result.

Another option which has got me out of trouble when there was too much wind rock was to get all of the required elements sharply focused on two or three shots then draw a selection around the difficult area on one image then copy and paste into place on the other image. Quite often I don't need to do a detailed selection because simply using a lasso tool with a bit of feather is sufficient. Possibly with a little tweak of an erasure brush where necessary.

[xpatUSA]

SOOC jpeg.

It's just a bit over-saturated (lots of zero level blues in the petals area). I notice that the in-camera saturation was set to zero and that the color space was sRGB - i.e. OK for both of those - but the WB was set to Auto; maybe that did it?

No big deal, by the way, it's hard to spot (low color detail in some areas) and some people do prefer the prettier colors.

[IzzieK]

I agree with the assessment of Nandakumar and Geoff, Alan...a merge of two shots should have been appropriate here...