Manual focus and cropping practice

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Having a little difficulty uploading images, let's try again.
As the title says, these are practice images for manually focusing and then cropping to suit.
How did I do?





I had a third picture but I can't get it to upload properly for some reason. Oh well. C&C welcome. I'm trying to learn.

[IzzieK]

I like that you both have cropped this in portrait orientation. Between the two I prefer #2. It is more balanced in the crop, whereas #1 although a pretty flower shot in its own right, is a bit too long at the bottom...I would rather that you have more space at the top of the flower than at the bottom in this instance...

Just in case, I would like to clarify that I am just commenting on your cropping, OK?

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Alan,

Having a little difficulty uploading images, let's try again.

Are you using the Go Advanced option when creating the thread?
The TinyPic method is much more reliable via that route than the default post/thread window.

Now to the pictures ...

With regard to focusing;

On #1, the nearer edges of the petals are exceeding the Depth of Field (DoF)*, or you focused just a tad too far back, since the centre and rear petals are sharp
On #2, you have chosen to focus on the rearmost of two blooms - and nailed it, however, this has given us a soft foreground bloom, which is generally not as acceptable (to the human mind) as the alternative choice. That said; for this particular pair, I still don't think it would work as a composition because the foreground bloom is smaller, so I'd have looked for another pair, or better still, a triple - and used a narrower aperture for the required greater DoF and dropping shutter speed and rasing iso to achieve a correct exposure

* I cannot see the aperture in the EXIF data, I assume, since shot with a Sony NEX-7, you were using a.n.other lens via an adaptor. The shutter speed is 1/1000s and iso 100 on both, so I would imagine that even in bright sunlight, the aperture may have been quite wide - please advise us (if you can remember)


With regard to cropping;

On #1, I would lose about 10% (of the height) from the top edge, I might also squeeze in the right hand side to exclude the upper yellow bit peeking in to frame.
On #2 the crop, with regard to placement of the blooms within the frame is fine

There are other PP techniques I'd use to improve these, but we'll stick to the advice you asked for.

Hope those thoughts are helpful, Dave

[Stagecoach]

Ok Alan, here's my personal view.

No 1 - As Dave has said, a bit off the top and a bit off the right to remove the two bits of yellow flower. The bud is fine but the bit of yellow flower lower left is tatty, it could be cloned possibly. This raises the the need to assess the framing more when setting up with an idea of what you want for the finished image, that bit lower left could have been pushed out of view?

Then comes the 'manual focusing' and it appears the rear petal edges are sharper than the front petal edges, was this intentional? I'm not saying it's wrong but something to consider.

No 2 - I would crop almost 1/2 the left greenery to the top flower, buts that's just me

For focus on this one, it's more on the front upper flower so a good comparison with No 1 as to which you prefer. I like that the lower right flower is well OOF.

[Shadowman]

Nice captures.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Thanks everyone for the comments/help. First, this was an exercise I put myself thru just to see what shooting my Minolta 58mm wide open would be like. These are actually crops of 'phase II' where I stopped it down to f2-2.8 because the CA was making it hard to focus at f1.4. I didn't really like the 'hallo' effect it was giving me either. I have my focus peaking color on yellow so the top picture was a little difficult to nail just right, but I'm pretty happy with it.
I'll try the 'Go Advanced' option next time David as I was using the default window. The problem was/is that once TinyPic uploaded the file, the 'thumbnail' if you will, covered the address window in the TinyPic window so I couldn't copy the address to put it in with the text.
As to the cropping, I debated keeping the yellow remnants on the right hand side in the frame, but left them to give it some depth. Guess I guessed wrong on that. Kind of the same thought with the foreground bloom on the blue flower also, but I guess it's a little too prominent since it's so big.
Thanks to your comments here, and on others posts, I'm trying to 'see' things before I hit the button. Flowers are still pretty new to me, but I'm trying. I must admit it's been a struggle to break out of my 'cars only' shooting of the past.

[bnnrcn]

I agree with Dave and Grahame about cropping #1 as suggested

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Re-crop of number one:



Retry of posting a pic I failed at before: