Hummingbird feeder

The soft colors in this shot are very nice. I'd like to pull much closer to the interesting flower in the middle. There are lots of distractions around the edges and the flower gets lost easily. The most distracting element is the bright piece of grass that runs right through the middle of the image. Next time, consider pushing it out of the way before shooting.

Your 180mm macro get get a LOT closer for a shot like this. Consider using a slightly smaller aperture (f8 or f11?) so you can get in close without losing too much depth of field. Isolating a flower and a couple of leaves would leave you with a lovely image - and would remove a lot of the distractions.

I do love the narrow depth of field, here. The entire background is a lovely, smooth green... which works perfectly. The light is soft and even, too. Good work!

Varina offers many solid suggestions. I, too, find the upright yellowish stem to be the biggest distraction. Soft colors are very nice.

One can always imagine how an image might appear without some part of it, and sometimes that's relatively easy to accomplish digitally. But not in this case. I feel that I should mention that if I, personally, thought that stem was too distracting I wouldn't have posted the image. It physically supports the plant and I found that support visually interesting as well because it tells you something about the environement this plant was growing in. The second out of focus stem adds contextually and provides some continuity. I can't help but see this, as I mentioned previously, as a procession moving from left to right. The shallow depth of field makes it appear almost flat and reminds me of something you might see in an ancient Egyptian tomb. But that's just me. I'm neither surprised nor disappointed that others don't see it the same way I do.

This was kind of confusing for me. I spent some time looking at it, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be looking at. I think it needs to be cropped, or something done to focus more on the exact flower. Other than that, though, I like the soft focus of the BG!

I would crop out the foreground blurred angled leaf leaning to the left; I would crop to the lower right leaf angling to the right.

The center portion with the red and green background should be stunning.

PS: I like the yellow stem...



the fisch