And of course I'd love to know, why you prefer one over the other ...

I like the first one more because the clouds didn't distract me as much. I didn't like how the clouds behind the top of the flower. I like the sky as well. great looking shots.

I like the first one more, because it has a more clear seperation between the subject and the background. In the first shot, there are flower petals in focus towards the bottom of the frame. In the second one you just have the stem and little bit of flower in focus at the bottom of the frame and then a bunch of out of focus flowers in the background. I hope that makes sense.

Paul

the first one is better because you show too much background in the latter and the flower gets lost in all the yellow; the first one the flower is much more prominent and a "wow"
factor and your bluesky makes me want to dream a little daydream....nice.

Paul,

The title should be "Blot on the Landscape" LOL

The first one for me - Its got a better balance over foreground and background, and colours. In the bottom one the dark patch of land competes too much with the rest of the picture and as already said the clouds are better positioned around the flower in the first.

Roger

Paul, I have to go with the top one, for the reasons stated previously. Plus the top one just seems less noisy, but that could be my monitor.

It's lonely here...I prefer the second for its better seperation of the foreground blossoms from the field of flowers. In the first a couple of the main blossoms blend too well with the BG. ( I would prefer a vertical crop though)

Here are the originals, resized, uncropped.
Crop to your heart's content !

i would like to see the first one...camera lowered , angled up more so flowers pop out of blue sky background yet retaining the yellow field below

i would like to see the first one...camera lowered , angled up more so flowers pop out of blue sky background yet retaining the yellow field below
The wide angle isn't wide enough to get the field in the shot, the plants are so uniform that you'd get a yellow line on the horizon, but no fieldscape.
Maybe the 10-22 on the 1DS might do it.

What I wanted in these is the background of the field giving some sense of the sowing lines and the foreground flower arranged rather like a tree growing on the border of the field would show over the field of yellow.
But with the yellow on yellow separated only by the differential focus.

I didn't like the first full frame, I thought the field yellow running off left of frame was a distraction. So I cropped it leaving the flower off-centre. Centred flower in a square frame didn't seem right to me, so I left that space on the right for it to lean into.

Seems my favourite in #1 pleased almost everyone. Sorry Chunk :)