Tulipby
Dav3dukComment by inspzil: Greetings from the Critique Club
By Inspzil who is knocking the rust from the critiquing pencil
Composition - Generally I like the composition of this shot. I would have like to seen the black area just a bit higher and a bit more to the left. The water drops are a nice touch. The colors are nice and vibrant. There are a couple of things about this shot that are just too "normal" I guess. Sometimes the angle of macro shots makes the shot as much as the subject. This is by no means saying that you're taking this at a bad angle, but its not anything fresh. I'm not a huge fan of flower macros, however I have taken some and seen a substantial lot of them. There are 2 kinds of flower macros in my book - There are the very unique revolutionary "I can't believe that's a flower" kind and then all the rest. Unfortunately yours is pretty good, but since it isn't anything groundbreaking, it gets shoved into the other category. Nothing personal, that's just the way it is :( Without your explanation in the comments, this made no sense to me for this category. I can understand why it didn't do as well as I'm sure you hoped.
Technical - The image is a little overexposed for my tastes. A little less exposure and/or dropping the ISO to 100 would've saturated the colors a little more and made it even a little more vibrant. In my opinion, you had enough light to be able to comfortably do that. The other alternative would be to close the aperture a little to lessen the exposure and also bring a little more focus to the outer regions of the photo. I think I would've done a little post-editing to increase the contrast a little more. You get more pop that way IMO. I'm not impressed by something that is unedited when there are ways that the picture could be improved simply. You could've done a little cropping to move the black spot more central and a little to the left by cutting some off the top and the right side.
Overall - I think your score is low for this image. I'm sure I've had lesser images that have scored better than this. Part of that is the flower macro bias that goes on (which I don't doubt that I also exercise from time to time). But key points to me were framing - exposure - contrast. There is nothing wrong with the general composition of this shot, but in the same breath, there is nothing outstanding about it either. Best of Luck to you - Bob
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