Greg

@annehorsby

Love the color/b&w version! Adds depth. And the tweaking of the character in the poster helped as well.

What did you do, have the background layer as color, made a b&w layer that you selectively erased to reveal the color below?

Thanks for the feedback, all. General consensus is that adding a cute caption does not improve a photo much. 🙂

Love the edit, Frank.

I agree that the rainbow is the star of the show.  But my eye kept wandering around that great expanse of shadow wondering what to do with itself.

Less is more, in this case. 🙂

Nice work with the curves adjustment. The bricks on the right had just a bit of glare coming off of them in the original.

Wow! This one kinda grabs ya.

(I’m still smiling.)

Technically, I wonder if there’s not more than enough shadow area at the bottom. I might crop it about four bricks down from the bottom of the window ledge.

Thanks!

JD (@jimronda3985) — Did you mean to post this to my post of the orange poppy? The Sharktank would be one level up from here.

Regardless, your photo could be improved with better focus. Do you use Photoshop? I would also recommend the app I mentioned — Topaz Lab’s Sharpen AI. Free 30 day trial.

Greg

@admin — It’s called Sharpen AI from Topaz Labs. Appears under Filters in PS or runs on its own. They have other apps that I don’t have as well. They give you a 30 trial, which was very helpful to me.

I do the Sharpen AI thing last, after all other adjustments and tweaks in Photoshop and Camera Raw. I also use Camera Raw to sharpen and eliminate…[Read more]

@admin

This was taken with my Canon EOS 60D and the kit lens, a Canon EFS 18-55mm, at 36mm for this shot. I also used an aftermarket sharpen/stabilize/focus app. Can’t say how far away I was from the flower.

I wish, too, that I had at least taken the above shot and then moved the frond from in front of the flower so I would have had a…[Read more]

Wow. Great capture.

Indulge a newcomer’s confusion here, but how on earth do you get such a shallow depth of field — about the depth of a fly eye — with f/16 and 60mm.  Given my Canon EOS 60D with a 18-55mm lens, that would practically be Ansel Adams DOF territory. Have I answered my own question with my gear stats?

Thanks for the input, Ladies. It’s far from perfect, as 3pco aptly points out, but this one made me feel good!

3pco,

Oh, but you are an incredibly useful curmudgeon. Thanks for your input.

Love this latest version. The background blends well with the darker colors around the chin and makes the face just pop. The original background looked like he was on the bump at Wrigley Field.

Hope there was plenty of safety measures between you and those incisors.

From someone like me who has no prior connection to the scene, I like Frank’s more simple, direct version. The buildings are few enough to blend into scene but are still there, as I think they add an interesting human/nature element. Without them, it becomes a pretty picture. (Not necessarily a bad thing, but it would seem less interesting.) The…[Read more]

Thanks for the insight, y’all. I saw this photo (after first having shot it in 2013 during a photography class) with perhaps a more fanciful eye. First, I agree with the advice based on what normally makes a black and white photos compelling.

Contrast.

However, this is still a boring photo even with contrast. What I was going for was the…[Read more]

f/4.5, 1/60, ISO 400, FL = 35.0 mm

Thanks, Frank!

Beautiful shot. I’m with Jasenka, could the mountain background be blurred to make Henry pop off the page a bit?