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Finally Posting One

I like to see all the photos other members post, but I haven't posted a picture myself. Time to change that!

Here is one I took recently. Any comments positive or negative are welcome!
 

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  • $Thistle.jpg
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I like it. My old eyes wish it was just a little brighter, but I love the subject and the use of your F-Stops. Keep 'em coming!!
 

Billski

Here I am, 1st again.
That's a close up.

Is it a burr?

Please do a small animal , such as a spider, or something else.
 
Hello shavitoff,

I like the black and white treatment of the finely detailed thistle. Looking at the shot, a couple of things that I would consider:

1) Needs more sharpness. I think that would help highlight the details, which there many of.

2) I'd look at trying to frame it with more room on the bottom and less on top, and possibly narrowing it slightly. I think it needs cropping. The bottom heavy square frame in this case gives a slightly sterile, documentary feeling.

3) The background is a challenge. I think I might clone out the plant in the upper left corner and then try to create a more even blend of the light and dark. I'm ok with manipulation as long as there's no misrepresentation about the image.

4) I think it could use slightly more depth of field, but a crop and sharpness increase might change my thought on that.

In any case, cool idea and shot!
 
Thanks for the comments!

I agree the subject is a bit soft in terms of focus. The image below is another version that makes the subject (which I think is some kind of thistle) a bit brighter. My photo editing skills are pretty low. I'd like to darken the light patch to the upper right of the thistles. This was originally a colour shot. I cropped out a lot of the background and changed it to black and white to simplify the picture.


This was shot at F9.

There were probably lots of spiders around that plant, but I missed them!$Thistle (2).jpg
 
I agree with a few sentiments above. It could be a little brighter. The DOF here is razor thin. I'd like to see a little more of the thistle in focus, but keep the nice cloudy looking out of focus area around the whole thistle.
 
I was using a zoom lens. I think I must have been manually focusing and the thistle was at the far end of the in-focus zone. If I had used auto focus with this lens, much more of the thistle would have been in focus at f9.
 
I mentioned earlier that I think it could use a little more dof, however, the big issue is sharpness. If you bump up the sharpness in post-processing, the dof can be better judged (and it will look better)... possibly enough to give a good sense of depth, without the flatness that come from too much dof. There will be a limit to how much you can sharpen this image before artifacts take noticeable effect, but the photo does have headroom for tinkering.

MarkM - DOF is determined by f-stop and distance to subject. The macro mode that some cameras have does not in and of itself have any effect on DOF. The macro mode is simply used to tell the camera to focus at close range.
 
I mentioned earlier that I think it could use a little more dof, however, the big issue is sharpness. If you bump up the sharpness in post-processing, the dof can be better judged (and it will look better)... possibly enough to give a good sense of depth, without the flatness that come from too much dof. There will be a limit to how much you can sharpen this image before artifacts take noticeable effect, but the photo does have headroom for tinkering.

MarkM - DOF is determined by f-stop and distance to subject. The macro mode that some cameras have does not in and of itself have any effect on DOF. The macro mode is simply used to tell the camera to focus at close range.

I'm talking about dedicated macro lenses or lenses with macro settings. where my 80-300 @ 250mm going through the stops, I may have 3-6 feet of DOF variation, when I set the thing to Macro, the DOF variations become fractions of an inch if not millimeters.
 
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