Cactus

My daughter came home today with a small cactus plant, I resisted

for over an hour before I had it in front of my tripod mounted D7000.

Using live view this is as sharp as I could manage(with a little help

from photoshop). How did I do?

Gareth, I live around cactus and have tried numerous times to get a good crisp shot. It is tough. This is pretty good. May I suggest a couple of things.  The black in the background is splotchy which distracts from teh crispness. Use PS to darken just that area. You might also try a little more saturation to make the color pop a bit more which would add to the crispness. I did this in my PS and I thought it improved just a little bit. Regards Dave.

Thanks Dave I will give it a try. I'm not sure how to darken just the background so that will be today's lesson.

Regards

Gareth

Gareth, use the magic wand tool in continuous mode and tolerance set to about 30. Place the wand on the background and left click. That will select all the black that is continuous with the point you clicked on. Then use levels to darken by sliding the left tab across the bar to the right. Regards Dave.

Hi Dave thanks for that, I did what you suggested then cloned out a few odd spots. I have learnt something new! Attached is the edited version, I'm having trouble re-sizing to fit in the thread but will work it out in the end.

Thanks for the advice.

Gareth.

Hi Gareth,

The use of F/22 was a mistake, especially with a short focul length lens (24mm).

Best Regards,  Mike.

Hi Mike, i quite like the result even if technically I made a mistake. I tried all sorts of settings and distances, this for me was the best i could do.

Gareth

Gareth, to resize a photo in PS go to IMAGE then go to IMAGE SIZE in the drop down menu. Do you have a telephoto lens or zoom that is telephoto? If so there are tricks you can use to get better depth of field. Dave

Dave I tried the resize in PS but couldn't get it any smaller. I will work it out eventually.

As for lens I have the nikkon 55-300 which frankly is not very good however  I took this shot with my 18-55 kit lens then messed around in PS.

When I get a spare half hour I will have another go and try and be more technically correct.

Gareth