My First Flowers

Well, this is the first flower oicture I've taken.

PLEASE - PLEASE post you C&C.

This is actually a fake flower I took @ my mom's house

This one is real

Even though it's fake, there's a lot more detail you can aim to capture in your image. The image is soft overall and the reds are badly blown so that you lose a bunch of detail there too. With this kind of thing, it's not a bad idea to experiment with differnet exposures to see what works best. You may not be able to tell for sure until you can look on your computer as most camera histograms (assuming you have one) don't show what individual channels are doing, so you can be blowing red when the overall luminance histogram isn't clipped. Also, red is a tough colour for JPEG compression, so you usually have to compress less with red in order to avoid too many obvious compression artifacts.

Here's an example with a real red rose. I processed to try to get reasonable brightness and contrast out of this one, but you can still see the texture and detail.

Konica-Minolta Maxxum 7 Digital ,Tamron SP AF 90/2.8 Di Macro
1s f/16.0 at 90.0mm iso100