Very nice quality of light and shades of grey. Consider cropping on the left to eliminate all but the two blossoms on the right.
Nicely done.
Yes, Dan's idea is better than mine. It requires more effort but the results are worth it.
More, perhaps, but still very little effort. One the first pass, I used photoshop's quick select tool to select the stuff I wanted to delete. It selected it perfectly, with no need for adjustment. I selected the levels adjustment, and photoshop automatically added my selection to it as a mask. I blacked that out. Then I did the same with the background. Again, the quick select tool made no mistakes. I would guess the total time was less than 2 minutes.
Something like this starts to require time and effort when it is hard to make a correct selection, but in this case, it was trivially easy because photoshop's quick select tool has become so polished.
Excellent work; Dan's modification does really work; Cogito's work brings some enigma to the image and works on another level
Thanks for the comments gents.
My software isn't that sophisticated so most of those crops/changes wouldn't be possible for me to make.
not sure about the crop but I love the B&W treatment.
I would have suggested the same as Dan's but Alan already once said before that his software is not good enough to do many things.