Agapanthus

Canon EOS REBEL T2i
EF-S55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS
6/9/2011 – 4:17:48 PM
1/100 sec
Manual
f/9
ISO 400
Focal length 90 mm
Handheld
Raw file processed in Photoshop Elements 9 for noise removal, sharpening, contrast changes, Topaz Detail Softlooking applied to the background (used the mask over the flowers from noise removal, then took some time to refine the selection, then inverted the selection) to see how that would look.

I have vertical images, which may seem more appropriate for this plant, but they also have way more of the background in them and don't seem to me to showcase the subject. I like this crop of a horizontal better than the verticals because it seems different and it seems to me to showcase the flowers.

I need to really make myself use different apertures besides f/9, but for this one even though I could have made the background less focused and hence not needed the filter I wanted this kind of big group of blooms to be as sharp as possible all over. So I did think about it but decided not to change the aperture.

Feedback on those things and also on the use of the Topaz filter as described above and on anything else would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!