Afican Daisies

[mdonahoe1]

Clipped thes out of the window basket today. CC appreciated!

Marianne

[Kaye]

Hi Marianne,
I love the lighting and sharpness on the second. Very nice.

[shirlm2]

Hi Marianne
These are lovely shots. My favourite without a doubt is #2. I love everything about this from the beautiful pale blue background, the diffused light through the petals giving lovely detail & the water drops. The dark centre just finishes it off with great contrast. (Nice space on the side for a bit of writing if you want to use it for a card!)

[kinetic]

Hi Marianne,

I love what you have done here, absolutely love it :)
In both you have isolated the flowers completely and that is working so well…as well as the slight offset and the straight on view of the second is just saying “look at me”…we can twist them, turn them, look from all different angles….but sometimes… simple, says so much more then the rest…and this is pictorial proof of that.
You have now established your self in this area so well of late….well done you :)

On the first one, you just needed to extend on the DOF to bring the entire flower into focus and that would have been the finishing touch for that one, on the second, you have nail this…again showing that bringing the entire subject into focus works so well on a flower when the background is knocked completely out or there is nothing distracting the main subject.
Controlling the DOF is so important to the artistic qualities of a shot and so often wrongly used, in fact, a lot of people wrongly use the term to refer to the out of focus parts of a shot.
Wrong use of DOF will only compromise the quality of a shot…you have done none of this in your shots and have done a brilliant job.
The water droplets just add another point of interest for the eye to view, and it looks like you have bounced a bit of light back on the second shot, which if this is the case, it has worked out very nicely indeed.
Beautifully executed work Marianne
Mark

[mdonahoe1]

Mark,
Wow! Thank you for such nice comments about these! I really appreciate your input and have to say that your suggestions and information about lighting has really helped me! Feedback like this from you really spurs me on to try more! Thanks, Mark.

[mdonahoe1]

Shirley
Thanks so much formyour very kind comments. If I can ever figure out how to make this a card I will be sure to do it! I'm still in awe of you r hydrangeas, against the light!

[mdonahoe1]

Kaye,
Thanks so much for your kind comments, too. It means so much. I have some time this week to work on a few projects so I hope to post some more to see what you think!

[mdonahoe1]

Can someone tell me what the stars over the attachment icon on the forum main page for Flora are? I don't think I've ever seen it and am not sure how they got there.

[Hype]

Hi Marianne,

The stars are because the thread has been rated. You can do this with all threads by going just above the first post where it says "View First Unread | Thread Tools | Search Thread | Rate This Thread | Display". Choose the "Rate this thread" option. You can choose between Excellent and Terrible. This will display the appropriate stars over the average rating for the thread.

Hope that helped.

[mdonahoe1]

Well thank you! It does help. I've been on this forum since September 28, 2010 and have never noticed that!! Now, does having a thread rated mean anything to anyone? Other than if it is my thread a good rating is good and a bad rating is bad!