CEREUS CACTUS BLOOM

I always appreciate and respect any feedback you provide and try to

learn from it. I will reciprocate for all who comment. I value honest

feedback and try to do the same for others as best as I can. Thanks.

Have fun shooting.

A beautiful image Dave. Lovely rich colours, good detail. I can see that you love doing Macro work as well. For my own 'enrichment' as well, just wondering, if your Focal Length was 50mm, what lens did you use?? Did you Manually focus or use Auto?? I think I saw the Metering Mode was 'other' and was not sure if that meant Auto. I am just trying to figure out why you used f/22?? This is a learning experience for me as well, so if you feel like sharing that info it would really help me.

Sincere thanks, Gail

Hi Dave,

Lovely soft colors .

The details are lacking, but that is what I expect from any lens used at F/22.

Aesthetically , a nice view though.

Best Regards, Mike

Simply beautiful. Great color and composition. Unbelievable DOF. Very nice!

Gail

I don't have a macro lens so I use either a wide angle or a telephoto and zoom in as close as I can from a distance. I wanted to get both the flower and cactus sharp so when I am not very far away I use the Fstop setting to give me maximum DOF. If I am farther back I can use a smaller Fstop to get more detail as Mike indicated, but then I have to crop down to get the close up look. This is a pretty big flower and I can get away with this method. However, I could never get the close ups you get with my lenses.

Mike

You are absolutely right about detail at F22. Maybe someday I will get a macro lens for flower close ups. For now I try to hit the happy medium between FStop and distance to subject. I am sure I could improve on the method if I took the time to calculate the DOF for the distance of the set up and adjust the FStop for optimum detail at the given distance. In this case I did not do the calculation ahead of time. This flower only blooms for a short time and I did not see it until it had lived most of its life. Thanks for pointing out the F22 limitations.

Wendy

Thanks for the visit. Since you are into abstract, I wonder what abstract you could make out of this.

Hello Dave, I find the colors very easy on the eyes and when I viewed this larger a decent amount of detail was there. Like the pollen on the white petals. It may be a little soft as Mike was going into about f22 but sometimes when we see things we like we shoot first and ask ourselves questions later. A fine shot Dave.

Regards,

Holger

Beautiful work!!

Dave,

Beautiful flower and nice capture - no doubt a macro lens would give you more leeway, but as far as f stop is concerned you have to decide if you want to have great detail on a tiny portion of the subject, or good detail on the whole image- I often use f 32, and then adjust clarity in post processing - seems to work.

Very nice capture.

Holger - As you say we sometimes shoot and ask questions later - but at least we learn that way  even if slowly.

Maurizio - Thanks for the visit.

The Savas - Thanks for looking. You have had many great flower shots. I have watched yours for the last couple of years and tried to learn from them. I have not commented much on them as you are the model and I am the student. But many thanks for sharing your work. As you say often a shot is really a choice between competing tradeoffs and trying to adjust in post processing.

Museeb - Thanks for the comment.

Hi David. Like I said earlier, this really is a lovely image.

Tried playing with the image as an abstract as you asked. Since it is cropped in pretty tightly, so I could only play with snippets. I tried uploading an example, but couldn't figure it out. Sorry.

Best,

Wendy

Excellent clarity, colors and details.

Splendid !

Congrats Dave !

I love it !

Wendy - thanks for trying. If you have the image in jpeg at a size of about 3 inches or 600 pixels, you can upload it when you submit the comment. The dialog during the actual submittal gives you an option to upload at the end.

Leo, Sreten and Florin. Thanks for you comments. Hope you enjoyed.