Bird of Paradise, backlit

What do you think of this picture? Is the background too busy? Is

there not enough detail in the stem/stalk? Is the center too washed

out? All comments are welcome.

There is significant banding and some pixelation on the image. Is this a result of a lower res image for uploading or is it evident in the original image? I think the backlighting is too strong and or the highlights misplaced. I would give this another shot. Best wishes!

Well, perhaps you have not noticed in other pictures, but photo.net saves uploaded pictures as a much lower quality JPEG than uploaded (undoubtedly to conserve space). The banding in ths sky is probably a result of that. Same with the pixelation, though I might have sharpened the picture too much.

 

Take a look at this picture that I uploaded that shows clearly the severe degradation that can occur in quality of the uploaded picture. All the artifacts around the leaves and in the sky are not present on the original (obivously) and are not present in the JPEG I uploaded.