Peony

A real great macro photo! Beautyful light and excellent cutout!

Very original macro picture of a flower. Good composition and beautiful colours

I tried to isolate and abstract the essential elements of what makes

this flower so attractive to me: the exquisitely contrasting but

subtly varying colors, the form of the petals and stamens and the

soft play of light within the cup of petals illuminating the center.

I moved in quite close with a macro lens to isolate this composition

as an abstraction of the flower.

 

I'd prefer to have gotten some more depth in the focus, but was

struggling with relatively low light (outdoors in cloudy shade) and

some movement of the flower. However, I think the sharp elements

contrast nicely with the softer surrounding background.

Excellent image - great colours. 6&6 from me. Although an absolutely outstanding image, I feel the left hand side of the frame is not balanced with the right. If I could give 6.5 for Aesthetics I would, but I feel it just misses a 7.

Excellent take on a familiar theme. Excellent composiion.

Perfect DoF...

I love this kind of macro photography. It isn't easy and you made an excellent photograph.

Thanks for all the kind comments. I wanted particularly to respond to Richard Thompson's note about balance. I struggled with cropping quite a bit and do consider balance to be a very important aspect of composition (much more so than somewhat arbitrary "rules"). I thought I'd include the original uncropped version to show something of my thinking. I certainly felt the extra bit of petal in the lower right was distracting and tried to crop just enough from both left and right to achieve some balance. I'd be eager to know if a different crop would be an improvement.

I see your point Zolt. Its a difficult one, and I don't think you could improve by cropping differently. I agree that the lone petal part on the bottom right of the uncropped version is destracting and that I do prefer the cropped version. I don't think you could improve the balance by cropping here, its the two very different textures which upset my balance !

 

However, with the above said, please take my words as *purely constructive*. It's a better macro shot than I've ever taken (I've just started trying to improve my macro techniques), and I really really like it - the dof on the filaments/anthers is amazing.