California Poppy

Critiques [Translate]

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• zto (262)
• [2006-07-27 5:03]
• [+]

Hi Cody,

First of all i'd liek to welcome you to TL. I hope you will enjoy your time here. it is a very friendly community. As for your first postings. Indeed puppies are lovley flowers. There are a few "beginners errors" in this picture though.
The first one i notice is the focus. It apears to be set on the bush in the back ground rather then on the flower. You can se how the flower is a abit blurry, especially th estem. Another effect this has is that the pettals seem to melt in to eachother. Red and yellow flowers tend to do this in any cases, especially in sun light.

The second thing i notice is the DOF, meaning the Depth of Field. The backgroudn is very sharp. With a smaller DOF it would have been more blurred out and the flower woudl stand out more from the background. With your focus being set on the background allready though, in this particular case, this woudl mean that your flower would have been even blurrier. So to correct this, you need to correct the focus as well. The last thin i notice, which also is acombination of the above...the DOF is that the backgroudn is rather busy which makes it distracting. We tend to look more on the bush rather then the flower itseld. There are two wasy to fix this. Either a smaller DOF as mentioned above, or to find a calmer backgroudn for the flower. maybe taking the photo from the other direction woudl have been enough. Sometimes it takes that we walk around our subject to try and find the best angle before we take the picture.

Keep up the good spirit and good work. Photography is a great hobby and you learn new things every day. You have come to the right place.