Summer Flowers

[InOmaha]

We recently purchased an Olympus E-Volt E510. I've been playing around with the different settings, and 200-300 pictures into it with some serious reading, I'm starting to get the hang of some of the basics.

Here are some pictures I took of flowers in our back yard.

With the first shot of the orange flower I used aperture priority and was playing with shutter speeds to see if I could catch it blowing in the breeze. It's set to F3.5 with a shutter speed of 1/1600 sec. I took several at different speeds down to 1/400.

The second shot was taken with the macro setting on the camera. I had to go with whatever the camera picked for aperture and shutter speed.

I did a little bit of cropping, lightening, and I editing out of a stray branch and a blemish.

I would be interested in comments and how others see the colors and contrasts since I'm viewing them on a laptop LCD.