Happy Valentines Day to you and all the other wonderful people on this forum who are so giving and generous with their critiques, advice, and sharing of their photographic knowledge. I don't post much but I learn every day.
Pretty flowers.
Pretty color compliments from the drapes and warm reddish tones of the wood. NO lighting specialist here, but it looks pleasing to me.
To present the overall scene I think the chairs are fine and in some ways balancing. The brighter painted wall pulls the eye away from the subject. Then I get brought even more to the cabinet and away from the flower. A bit of, not especially intrusive or problematic, lens flare on the left. How would this work if you had shot a bit more from the left?
Looks very "snapshot" like ... likely due to the combination of the small format (4/3) and the f22 aperture. At f22 on 4/3 I'd expect to see more apparent dof, wondering if diffraction is in play here a bit with such a small aperture that the reduced contrast is yielding a less sharp perception that translates to feeling of lesser dof.
Also, I'm wondering if the 4 sec exposure time did you no favors in the color of your shadows as the transition from from your key window light fades in the recesses of the drapes, noting how much more yellow they become as you move farther left.
A few tweaks at sharpen/blur/color/vignette ... 5:4 crop to showcase your pretties.
Actually, it's part of an experiment in subtile light painting, specifically to match my impression of some Jackson Browne lyrics from "The Pretender" that were rattling around in my head. (The small aperture was used to allow painting the flowers selectively with an LED torch.) Here's a version with the light painting executed for more drama:
Kent, I was trying for the soft morning light look, but since the actual soft morning light was perhaps a bit softer than I wanted, I tweaked it with an LED torch. The actual difference between a wide aperture, for example, f5.6 and the small f22 was actually fairly small - mostly visible in a reduction in some micro-contrast which I feel works for the soft morning light feel, rather than much of a sharpness reduction . To illustrate, the 100% crop image on the left was shot at ISO 1600 and f5.6 and the one on the right was shot at ISO 200 and f22. (The zoom lens was set to 36 mm - about a 35 mm equivalent to 72 mm. The lighting variations are due to the inconsistency in light painting.)
+1 @ lower contrast with intended mood. I suspected that might have been in your agenda.
Interesting to see the variant impact of ISO 1600 vs. f22. What would also be interesting would be to see the same shot @ 5.6 / ISO 200 rather than 5.6 / ISO 1600. This would give a baseline of how much impact the ISO change to ISO 1600 creates, as well as how much impact the aperture change to f22 presents.
