Painted Lady

[Rose]

Comments on this one please ? Not intended to be a nature photo, it's more pictorial

Painted-Lady-2.jpg (144.19 KiB) Viewed 4076 times

[Nina]

Can you post the Exif data please Rose?

I assume it was taken with a macro lens and that you were looking for a shallow D O F.

There is a lot to like in the image , soft light and colours are appealing. Have you thought about a tighter crop whereby you would lose the half daisy on the left?

[davidc]

I like it as is, works well, and keeping the space on the left is fine for me. Given that the overall scene is fairly light, I'm not sure the usual rule of "no bright spots at the edge" applies (it's mostly all bright!" and I hadn't even noticed the other daisy until Nina pointed it out - the contrast of the "dark" butterfly against the white background definitely caught my eye. If anything, I'd crop a little on the right rather than the left perhaps, but only if I'm being nitpicky.

Also the space on the left means you have a place for an editor to add text if you were to send it in to a magazine or something

[Mike Farley]

Hi Rose

Apologies for the belated reply, a combination of being on holiday last week followed by the "Great Computer Disaster of June 2014".

In the main, I am with Nina about the inclusion of the flowers on the left, which provide an unnecessary distraction. Personally, I would either crop and/or clone them out depending on the required aspect ratio as I do not think that they add anything. I would also query the way that you have chopped off the tips of the petals at the bottom of the main flower. Either everything should be included or there should be a much tighter crop. What you have here looks wrong and gives the impression that it was unintentional. Finally, there is the intrusion of yellow from another flower below the butterfly's wings which I would remove.

The main question is whether I like the limited DOF and overall I do, with the colours and the out of focus areas giving a pleasant, dreamy feel to the image. That said, it is difficult to tell from a small, low resolution JPEG whether the point of focus is where it needs to be, which is on the insect's head. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might actually be just behind where the wing joins onto the body, but I accept that I could be wrong.

[Paul Heester]

There is a lot to like in this image and Im with David on leaving the left-most daisy in. I suspect that were it to be included in a nature competition it would suffer due to lack of DOF. However, I believe it has all the elements you need in focus to tell the story. As an experiment it would be interesting to see if the darker band running along the top was either cropped or brightened.