Tulips

What works in this photo, and what doesn't? All comments appreciated.

Thanks.

I hate photos of flowers. But this one made me say "oh Wow". Congratulations!

somthign seems off

especially the same tone pink of the flowers and top, nice light too but I'd like to see the girl's face sharper and perhaps a nicer expression as she is holding her mouth funny.

Ideally, the girl should have been facing into the photo, not out of it. But worse, the foreground flowers are the sharpest things in the photo(although still a bit soft), while the girl who should have been the main subject is very soft and out-of-focus. Wonderful opportunity that was wasted.

The girl.,the colours of her clothes and the combination of the colours of the tulips....Simple ??? NO WAY ., its a masterpiece including the angle and the cropping.

Hat off

What works? Everything works! The tones of the colors in the flowers perfectly complement the colors in the girl's sweater. The fact that she is walking into the wind. The fact that she is a brunette, which adds another color to the shot. The changes in the tones of the tulips as you move your eye from the front to the back of the image. WOW!!

Especially all the specifics you've mentioned. I'm glad some of you liked it. :)

 

I agree about the focus; if you saw the full size original (the large size here is about 1/4 size) you'd see that the flowers just beyond the girl are actually the sharpest things in the image. Several things conspired against me here to make her face a little soft: she was running, the wind was blowing the tulips, it's a handheld shot with a telephoto lens, the moment was very brief and I'm using a new camera and had it on the wrong autofocus setting for the situation (never had autofocus before). Next time I'll do better. Still, I don't think it's horribly bad as her face doesn't have any sharp lines or features anyway. I can always play around with USM in Photoshop before printing. I agree that her expression could be better as well, but I don't know what I could have done about that!

 

I deliberately placed her facing out of the image, however. She was running through the tulips and leaving a path almost like a wake behind her, which was enhanced by the long shadow. If it looks like she's about to step out of the frame, it's because she was! I wanted to get that sense of motion into the image.

 

BTW, it's not cropped or edited in any way, beyond the in-camera autosharpen (which I forgot to turn off) and using an image editor to reduce the size of the image for posting.