First flower photograph

First attempt tonight with my neighbor's flowers:

Canon T1i
24-70 L
70mm | 1/3'' | f/2.8 | ISO 100
On tripod
PP: white balance and vignette in Lightroom

Thoughts?

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I think it looks great... my eyes go all over the place a little, but I like it like that.

Thanks! Haha...I kinda see what you mean. Is it too busy? I know a large part of composition is background. I purposely captured the non-bloomed flower because I thought it would add interest to the picture - i.e. "oh, that's what this very-bloomed flower started out looking like". I dunno...just a thought.

perhaps a tighter crop of the top might help the viewer focus more? just throwing out ideas.

Interesting. You make a good point. This just "feels" more appealing to look at and less busy....

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I like the crop. But having said that... it depends on what you intend to tell with your photo. If you want to show the flower and its development than your initial idea is right. Show a full flower in bloom in all its glorious detail and the bud or even a bud and a stage in between. Then you got to make sure that the full flower is as much in focus and shown in total as possible. That is where your first shot is lacking: it cuts off some parts of the flower and some are not well focussed.

BTW, this is my personal interpretation of how to depict flowers. Some others may have a totally different approach.

The second shot is attractive because it gets away from the "show the flower" idea and is just a nice and balanced composition with nice colours and a great bokeh.

Very nice image, lovely flower.

Did you hang over the fence to get it?

the second cropped version is more appealing. It's slightly underexposed, a boost in exposure would give the image a bit more pop.

Thanks for all the comments! This is actually very helpful for better training my eye. I see your points about the picture telling two different stories based on what's included.

grainoflight: You're totally right. I don't know if that occurred when I did the vignette (which I'm now not as fond of now) in the original or not. I'm also mad because this was sort of an "on a whim" shot with my neighbor's flowers. Grabbed my cam and my new manfrotto pod and just snapped a few quick shots. I forgot to set it to RAW, so I limited my editing abilities. Here's the tweak I applied to the the JPG in Lightroom - you're right. the colors pop more when it's not underexposed: