Just some dried up old teasel ...

[bambleweeney]

Went out the other day to take some pictures of a lake that was supposed to be really lovely ... and wasn't. Saw these poking over a fence and so grabbed a couple as they looked sort of interesting and then spent an hour or two shooting them in natural light in the studio (a.k.a kitchen)

[MiniChris]

I like the composition but not sure I like the soft-ting of the areas around the flower tops...in some ways, it looks as if you changed the shadow value from black to white...not to say that isn't good, but it's not consistent with the shadow on the stem of the left-side flower. Not knowing the light source, background, etc makes it more of a ??? call than anything else. The flowers, i like, the composition I like, even the background is intriguing but I cannot seem to make a seamless one-thought decision about it as a whole...Lordy-lordy, I sure hope that made sense.

[bambleweeney]

See what you mean. The flowers were shot on white card with the lighting as shadowless as possible in front of a large window with a white card to bounce back light in an attempt to reduce any remaining shadow. The idea was to vignette the hell out of it and do a monochrome sepia conversion. As it happens it sort of came out monochrome sepia anyway without needing a mono conversion. The final image looked a bit stark so I added the textured background and proceedeed to wrestle with the vignetting which for some reason was a real pig. Looking at it from your perspective Chris I think I need to retry that part of the image. Oh well, nothing else planned for the day ....