single photos angel

any ideas as how i could improve this shot would be greatly

appreciated

yea that does look a bit better

gah what the crap is with these ppl constantly giving me horrid ratings???? i mean a 2/2 defenitly deserves a flipping critique, gah.

I agree with Sondra that this needs to be lighter but I don't think she went light enough. I have played with this in PS a little to try to bring out the rich colors in the flower. I created another layer and set blending mode to screen then used a soft brush with layer mask to reduce the hightlights. Because of the small file size I had to blur the background due to JPG artifacts, I didn't want to because I think your selective DOF is great. I like how you have the statue and background nicely out of focus as it really brings your eyes to the flower. I also like the cropping and composition of the image, I just wanted to see the flower pop. I don't know much about lighting but think that a fill flash wouldn't have worked because the highlights would have been blown. Due to the bright highlights and a digital not being able to record the whole contrast range you could have tried a tripod and 2 exposures. One for the highlights and one for the shadows and blended them.

Don