Steve Spencer
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 p.1 #5 · Cowslips in the Marsh | |
JimFox wrote:
Hey Steve,
Those are some very pretty flowers! Especially in #1 and 2, but to some degree in all of the shots, the sky looks wierd, some wierd blue colors going on, and a lot of blurryness. Did you blend in a bracketed shot up there in place of a blown out sky? The compositions in #1 and 2 and the best as far as the flowers go, #3 and 4 I hate to say it, they have more of the feel of just a snapshot. Shooting flowers like that to me is very difficult, you really have to work and think and look at the patterns created by the clumping of the flowers, and really watch the edges of your frames, trying as much as you can to not cut flowers off...
As for #1, which to me has the best flower arrangement, I would actually crop off all of the sky, and just let it be a square forest shot.
Jim
Hi Jim,
I very much appreciate your honest feedback. I did struggle with the compositions a fair bit and your advice is sound. I think I may have shot them a bit too wide angle (they were shot at 10mm on a 1.6 crop camera) making it difficult to compose so that I didn't cut off flowers somewhere. I know I can do better and will focus on that more next time I shoot. With regard to the sky, I think what you are seeing is that I used a polarizer because the leaves of these flowers are quite shiny and at the ultra-wide angle it of course can cause some problems with blues in the sky. That, and the dynamic range was pretty extreme (even though it was less than an hour after sunrise) in this dark swamp compared to the bright sky. I didn't use a blend, (it is a single shot) but I did have to use some fairly heavy highlight recovery and I suspect the amount of data is the sky is not what it should be. I will try to shoot again this weekend and try a longer focal length and I will be much more careful with the composition. Thanks so much for your helpful feedback.
Steve
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