Spring... Have we had winter yet?

Hi,

I went to Martin Mere at the weekend, home to thousands of birds, and photographed snowdrops. Never been one for tradition.

I had to lie in a patch of nettles to take the picture. Good job nobody was around to hear me cursing.

Rob

Canon 20D | 100-400mm F5.6 @ 220mm F5.0 | 1/200 | ISO 100

Hi Rob

I think for this image to have really worked with the side/back lighting I feel you needed to isolate the snowdrop even more and expose for the flower alone. As it is there are too many distractions in the image and a little too contrasty!

David

I agree with David, he say's it all

Well I quite like it because it looks realistic. Snowdrops are a difficult subject and far too often people isolate a single flower from the group. Snowdrops are a social flower! I also think the exposure is as good as can be (perhaps a bit underexposed?). I don't know what "exposing for the flower alone" means - there is only one correct exposure value for any scene. Anything else is either over or under exposed.

I would have preferred another OOF flower head in the bottom right hand section to balance the one on the left. Other than that it is a very good and different image. Bird Photographers eh? Addicted to boring meaningless backgrounds!

Dave
Forest of Dean, UK

Nice idea and almost there IMO. The shot is a bit contrasty and you need to really control the contrast for it to work - either to tone it down, or to use it more, say by placing the snowdrop petals against the black/dark background - ie separate it more from the other out of focus snowdrops. Moving to your RHS and dropping the camera a bit lower would have put the flower higher, and helped to remove the oof flower in the lower LHS of the shot.

Hi,

Thanks for all the comments.

I have tried to tone down the contrast as suggested.

Rob