Every now and then I take a photo, edit it, upload it to Flickr, look at for a while…and then decide to not use it here on Weekly Fifty. I’m not sure exactly why, but some photos just don’t hit the same when I look at them later as they did in the moment when I took them, and other times it just feels like the image rings kind of hollow for some reason. Maybe I was attempting to get some kind of cool, neat, or interesting photo but it didn’t work out or didn’t quite meet my expectations, and while it might not be a bad photo it just doesn’t really merit 500 words of analysis along with audio commentary.
This was almost one of those images. I shot it while walking to my office on a rainy morning as the sun was coming up, and unlike some other times I really did have something specific that I was going for: I wanted to highlight the line of three drops of water on the left side of the purple petals, or at least make sure they were in focus so they would hopefully catch the eye of a casual viewer. And so I set about making that happen: Got out my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, dialed in an F/13 aperture, positioned myself so that the flower was in the middle of the frame, focused on the drops, fired off a couple clicks of the shutter, checked focus by peeking at the image on my camera, and went away pleased at the image I was able to capture.
When I loaded the RAW file in Lightroom though, something didn’t quite hit me in the same way. Yes the drops were in focus, as was my goal, and I liked the bright yellow spots of light in the background, and the purple magnolia flower itself turned out pretty good…but something wasn’t quite right. The more I looked at the shot, the more I realized it was just too busy in the background. It’s full of crisscrossing lines, other flowers vying for viewers’ attention, flower buds that intrude on the image…it’s all just too much. At least for my taste, anyway. And because of that it almost went into the pile of “decent but not quite good enough for the blog.” I eventually decided to include it, of course, otherwise you would not see it here, because I’m genuinely curious what you think. Especially when you compare it to another similar shot I shared two weeks ago. Which one do you like, and why? I would love to have your thoughts in the comments, and maybe even mention what you would have done differently if you were in these situations.
Rebecca R Burlingham says
Try cropping it really really tight to the left side of the flower. The edge of the petal will give it a nice diagonal line. I cropped it to be a vertical pic, just above the top petal and catching only a little of the green base of the flower, enough to give the petal a place to rest. Then play with the exposure of the water droplets to make them shine.