Carnation

[Jack R Mann]

f11 5s iso400 window lighting.

[kezmal]

Lovely! I can smell that sweet carnation fragrance

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Jack,

Good lighting, exposure and focus.

The tonal range isn't quite filling the range available (according to the luminance histo).
My suggestion to address this would be to apply some Local Contrast Enhancement (LCE) with UnSharp Mask (USM) 'sharpening' rather than mess with levels.

LCE will also enhance the texture in the petals - I would suggest using an amount of 10%, radius of 80px and threshold of 0. I would try those and see if that fills the histogram; if not raise the 10% slightly until it does.

I raise the following as a discussion point only, the compositional impact of what is in the corners;
dark in top left,
pink top roght,
green lower right and
bright red lower left.

I feel my eye being pulled to lower left corner and the rest of them sort of 'unbalance' the composition.

At the very least, I would have attempted (at shooting time) to put the bright red in shade from the window light, if not re-arrange the background to avoid it altogether.

Hope that helps,

[jprzybyla]

Hello Jack, I like your image of the Carnation, it reminds me of a Rose I shot recently (almost the same colors). A couple things I noticed. The focus falls off towards the back of the flower. You used f11, I would suggest trying f16 or f22. I find that for me to get the depth of field to keep everything in sharp focus most times I need either f16 or f22. Also the shutter speed of 5 seconds seem like a long time for good window light, makes me wonder what lighting conditions you shot under.

[Jack R Mann]

I shot under window light only. I thank all of you for input will try some of these methods.