This is nice but needs something...edit request...

This pic is unedited, just out of the cam as a jpg and reduced in size. It's quite a nice flower, whatever it is, but needs something. I dinked with it for a bit but never came satisfied.

Have at it and let me know what you come up with.

Thanks
AA

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what? no one feels like being creative and helping a brotha out?

AA

you might need to crop tighter! but also you need to provide a bigger file for people to work with. i think this one is too small and heavily compressed!

Looks out of focus - like it's taken with an unsharp lens or was hand-held. Or was "soft" intentional? Soft does go well with the pastels.

Otherwise, I find the center framing uninticing. A pretty wall decoration but nothing I would look at and say "wow".

It's a matter of taste so that's just my .02.

I just found the whole flower weird. I know the center crop is not right but put it here for editing like "this is how it came out of the camera".

As far as size, it's as close to the 100K limit I could get.

Maybe it is out of focus, I just can't tell. The colors hurt my eyes. Shot this last week in Amsterdam, hand held. Not soft intentional.

Thanks anyhow.

It's very soft (OOF). If you have the image on your computer at home, just zoom in so the flower covers your entire screen, you'll see that nothing is sharp.

This is a result of using a non-macro lens that's not designed for accurate focus at close distance, possibly using a wide aperture (yours is f7.1, not too bad for 135mm and well within the sweet spot, but DOF is still a little shallow at this distance), hand holding the camera (likely, since 135mm will exaggerate camera shake) , slow shutter allowing the wind to blow it (1/200th isn't that fast for hand holding a 135mm this close up - it's marginal), or a combination of all this. OOF is not a usual look for Macro photography.

Also; the perfect symetry of a straight-on shot is not that interesting, again that's just my opinion. Sometimes perfect symetry is a good thing.

Don't mean to sound like a know-it-all since you may already know all this. Just offering up one amature's opinion that it is very soft and why.

RE: Size. You have a Smugmug account. Why not post links to EXIF and the original image. Inviting edits on an attached image just isn't too useful except for crops. This photo probably needs some color and contrast work to do it justice.

Thanks NB. Actually I'm really new and knew none of that. Thanks for the pointers.

This board is pretty handy and someday I'll end up with good shots.

Thanks
AA

It may be soft butI still had fun playing! Pretty flower.

thanks 98!

Just needed to make it stand out a little. I never desaturate the bottom layer all the way.

That looks great 98.