Orchids

I would be very grateful for any comments on / critique of this photo of

orchids. I used a D90 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. Thanks in advance.

sean,  i think you might be mistaken about what these are,  they look more like lilies then orchids.  like the simpleness of everything here.  lovely work!

Thank you for your compliment, Roger. My wife is sure they are lillies too, although the flowers are in the orchid garden.

Hi Sean - I'm not a flower expert so I'll leave the identification argument to others. Although I love the simple beauty of these flowers, I wish the image was much sharper. The flower on the right is quite blurred. As an idea, that I hope will be helpful, you may want to rethink how to maximise sharpness while photographing this type subject. My first advice- get and use a good, solid tripod. Often times the difference between optimal sharpness and a slightly or even completely blurred subject, is the use of a tripod. The second piece of advice I learned the hard way - by making the mistakes: select a higher F-stop - the larger the F-stop number, the smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of field, the greater the sharpness across the image. In this image, you selected a very small F-stop = a wide open lens = minimal depth of field = the less of the image in maximum sharpness. Because there is distance between these two flowers (I'm guessing these are two separate plants) you may need to alter your shooting angle so that each flower is placed so that your lens is able to focus accurately on each flower. Then you might set the F-stop (aperture) to as large a number as possible (minimum aperture, maximum DOF = maximum sharpness) and then either set the shutter speed to match or select aperture priority and allow the camera to set the shutter speed.

There are times when you will want to isolate your subject from the surroundings, and this will require using a smaller F-stop. However, in this image, I suspect you could use the larger F-stop without creating a busy background. I hope this is helpful. Thank you for sharing this image.

Irene

Hi Irene. Thank you very much for your comments, which are very helpful. I took several photos of these flowers from various angles and different combinations of aperture and shutter speed and this was the best of the bunch.

When I changed angle even slightly, very light backgrounds came into the frame, so some of the contrast was lost. This also meant that, in order to keep the contrast, the right hand flower ended up further away from the camera than the left hand one.

On reflection, I should have spent more time playing with the aperture so that both flowers were in focus whilst keeping the blurry background.