Santan

by Sherwin
(Manila Philippines)

I just want to capture in still one of the most common flowers here in the Philippines and try to bring out the beauty of it in its simplicity.

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A very nice flower shot!

One of the important things to consider with photos of flowers is how to isolate the blooms.

The best way, and the method I suspect Sherwin has used, is to open up the aperture on the camera.

By setting a wide (open) aperture there is a very shallow depth of focus. This means that the flower is crispy sharp, but the background is blurred.

This concentrates the viewers' eyes on the flower, and neatly removes any distractions into the bargain! Click to read more about depth of field.

If your camera doesn't have the ability to control the aperture (and hence, the depth of field), try using the macro setting instead (it will be shown by a picture of a flower).

As always with photos like this, the crop is important. This photo is close on the flowers, but there is an awful lot of emptiness at the top of the photo.

This can be removed easily with the crop tool (click to read a digital photography tutorial on using the crop tool).

However . . . I think it would have been better to lower the camera a little as the photo was taken.

There's 'half' a bloom at the bottom of the photo, and emptiness at the top. It would have been far better to have framed the photo to include the whole of the bottom bloom, and lose the emptiness at the top.

The only other suggestion I would make would be to use software to boost the contrast a little, and maybe the saturation too. Finish it all off with a little sharpening, and you'd have a really punchy photo!

Thanks Sherwin for the submission, and I hope there are some useful tips here,

Ed.

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