Do you like this? 'cause my wife does not.

[JeffreyG]

I'm working on improving my eye and composition.

I just happened to notice some tulips up in the yard and took this. I like the arrangement, I think the red and green look good together and I think the pattern and use of shallow DOF gives a sense of some kind of tulip forest.

My wife doesn't like it. She thinks the shallow DOF is annoying, especially due to the far left tulip being within the DOF instead of in front of it.

As an aside, this shot would not have worked stopped down, that dreamy green backdrop is really a bunch of tattered and spotted leaves.

[Damo77]

I like it. But you've got buckleys of printing those reds - better ease off the saturation a bit. The red channel is blown right out.

[JeffreyG]

I blew the reds in RAW. There is no saturation boost in PP. I generally shoot with luminance histogram and I always forget to change to RGB when shooting flowers. I'll remember one of these days.

Thanks for the comments though.

[Robert_Lay]

I agree 100% with your wife.
The only excuse that you have is that you couldn't find a way to isolate from the background, and that's exactly what it is - just an excuse.

[photoguy6405]

Something about the colors seems 'off' to me. I hadn't noticed the left flower being in focus until you mentioned it, but now that I know it's there...

[bill boehme]

I noticed that you let Adobe Camera RAW do Auto adjustments which is generally not a good idea. Although ACR seems to be fairly good at finding color balance, it usually falls flat when performing other exposure adjustments and will sometimes come up with some strange combinations of brightness, contrast, black point, fill light, exposure, clarity, and vibrance. I think that by cropping the image and processing it manually, you will bet better color and something more pleasing to she-who-must-be-obeyed (or maybe not). Here is an edit that I did -- you can take credit if she likes it and blame it on some Internet troll if she doesn't.

262904

[Glenn NK]

Before looking at Bill's crop, I was thinking, "the flowers are too far apart and are pulling my eyes all over the place".

The crop helps, but finding some tulips closer together will make a dynamite image IMO.

The selective focus/DOF is very effective I think.

[JeffreyG]

Thanks for all the help everyone!