flower pics from longwood gardens pa orchid show:

[fauxbird]

ok all of these but the last picture is from the orchid show,the last i put up is from my sisters yard and was done with a sigma lens as i thought others may like to see the kind of pics you can get from that lens,1=pitcher plant flower yes they get flowers who knew?2/3/ and 4=paphiopedilums and 5=pink columbine flower taken with a sigma apo dg 70-300mm macro lens without using macro.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Suzanne,

Sorry, Busy day, haven't been here as much as usual today.

There are some nice specimens there for sure. I don't think I've seen anything like #1 before!

Photographically, and no doubt not telling you anything you don't know already, #2, #3 and #4 are suffering from a lack of control of background, but at a show, you're at their mercy with that

Sadly, #5 looks like focus was a bit off; that right foreground bloom (almost out of shot) looks sharper than the subject. And, if at all possible, if you had a slightly lower viewpoint, or could use a convenient sister to gently hold those other flower heads out of shot, it would help the photo.

I also see most were shot around f5.6, a smaller aperture, say f11 or f16, would give a better DoF on the blooms, although I appreciate that you needed this shallow DoF for the background suppression in the middle 3 shots - so I am sorta contradicting myself. (already , I usually wait until the second post for this!)

I might also consider PP (post processing) out the wire stands (on 2, 3 and 4), not sure how you'd feel about that?

I was going to suggest a little more saturation on 3 and 4, but a better idea, if you haven't used it, is to try local contrast enhancement using UnSharp Mask (USM), I think that might benefit these shots. First, read the tutorial here (see the IN PRACTICE section on how to do it), but then on these, I'd say try some values like 15%, 60px, 0 or 1 threshold. This technique has the side effect of giving a little more punch to the colours (sorry; colors)

Thanks for showing these, I hope the feedback was worth waiting for,

[fauxbird]

oh no i dont mind i was just finding it a bit boring as no one wants to chat,these shots were just me trying the camera out for the first time,the show pics i think i did some in portrait mode and i did feel the background was busy but im not the type to run around with a black board,im just learning to work with the aperture and shutter speed without using any of the modes on this camera,and i am waiting on a copy of tiffen DFX as i thought i would use it to get more dof from the backgrounds,im still learning to work with the photo programs and i have a few different ones i play around with,oh the last pic it was kinda windy i just wanted to see what the sigma lens could do i have a better pic i just used that one because of how good the dof was,and for number one no i did not know pitcher plants got such interesting flowers you learn somthing new every day