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The cycle of life
The cycle of life
kurtmooreoh


Photograph Information Photographer's Comments
Challenge: Flowers II (Advanced Editing VII)
Camera: Canon PowerShot A720IS
Location: Marion, Ohio
Date: Jul 9, 2009
Aperture: f 4.8
ISO: 320
Shutter: 1/1500
Galleries: Floral
Date Uploaded: Jul 13, 2009

 Shot about 9:30 a.m. while I was taking pictures at a local prairie. I honestly was fascinated that the bees did not move despite having a tripod and camera set up near them. I tried to get both the full blooms and the yet-to-bloom flowers in the photo to carry through the "cycle of life" theme. I used a tripod and set the timer on the camera. The camera was set on micro photography. While another photo I had taken showed a circle of activity, such as the full cycle of life, and showed a few dead petals, I felt this one was better. I liked the features of the one bee's face. I also loved the lighting, how the sun shone on the flowers and the bees' wings. As far as editing, I cropped the photo and used the photo enhance feature on iPhoto on a Macintosh computer. I also resized the photo because it was originally too large for the contest's guidelines.

Statistics
Place: 252 out of 255
Avg (all users): 4.1061
Avg (commenters): 4.0000
Avg (participants): 4.1446
Avg (non-participants): 4.0408
Views since voting: 656
Views during voting: 217
Votes: 132
Comments: 5
Favorites: 0

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AuthorThread
 08/04/2009 07:01:32 PM
Greetings from Ernie of the Critique Club!

Subject: Is the subject the flowers (the challenge topic) or the bees?

Composition: Unfortunately it seems to be quite centered and is not totally sharp. (the focus appears to be soft)

Technicals (exposure, noise etc): The image appears to have a great deal of noise (digital grain) which detract from the photo. It is almost like this is a highly cropped piece of an image. It also appears to be a bit too highly saturated. The orange of the flower seems to be almost unnatural.

Improvements: I noticed in the exif information on your photo that you used your digital zoom while taking this? It is never a good idea to use a point and shoot camera's digital zoom. Essentially all it does is crop your image to make it appear to be closer up. If you wanted to do that you could do so yourself in your image editing program afterwords and yet have much more precise control of the crop. If you then further cropped the image as you state in your comments then that would explain the noise in the image. You are actually using a very small portion of the original frame. I think the photo enhance application of Iphoto has oversaturated the colours here.

My suggestion would be to spend about an additional $70 and buy a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements as your software for editing. It is available for a Mac and it can do about 85% of what the full version of PS can do, but at a fraction of the price. :)

Good luck. I look forward to seeing more of your images in the future.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
 Comments Made During the Challenge
07/19/2009 07:38:44 PM
The bees became subject~instead of the flower...OOF too.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
 07/15/2009 09:15:06 PM
Seems that the focus point is a little behind the main subject matter.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
 07/14/2009 03:19:10 PM
Nice but a bit blurry.
  Photographer found comment helpful.
 07/14/2009 12:52:42 PM
Vibrant colours but looks too grainy and soft. Strange colour border at the bottom too.
  Photographer found comment helpful.


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