This was taken with a 50mm F1.7 lens wide-open and a cheesy Tiffen single-element +4 closeup lens. I took it in low light on Provia 100 in the Santa Cruz mountains above Palo Alto.

I cropped it square as an experiment. What do you think?

-- Mark Erickson (maericks@netcom.com), May 25, 1999

Answers

Very artistic. I like the selective focus and soft quality. It is especially effective with the nearly black background. The square crop gives it the feeling of being a painting more than a photograph, but that's alright. I have a few of those myself. Very nice! Donna

-- Donna Bollenbach (cassidy@icubed.net), May 25, 1999.

Very nice. I like the selective focus. The use of negative space (white space) could be improved, IMO. If you originally had more negative space above the flower, I would re-think the crop. It's still very nice, and that's only intended as an improvement, not a "ding".

I think it could also have been improved by shifting your poisition so the one petal isn't directly behind the bud, but rather the more out-of-focus highlights. That would separate the bud more from the background and be (slightly ;>) more interesting, again, IMO.

I'm very fond of sqaure images shoot square myself. Keep thinking "square". Hassy's and Rollei's make the best square negs on the planet.

Keith

http://www.clarkphoto.com/

-- Keith Clark (ClarkPhotography@spiritone.com), May 26, 1999.

I like what you were trying to do. It gives me some ideas to try. For me, though, the not-far-out-of-focus flower below is bothersome. I would have tried to physically push that flower back to be more out of focus.

-- Tom Goodrick (tgoodrick@earthlink.net), May 31, 1999.