sunburst flower

[hocy4life]

i doubt that is the real name of the flower, but i think it would be fitting. lol. it was in a nieghbors front yard...caught my eye.

[freygr]

I would of liked a little more DOF

[Loupey]

Hi, Hocy, and welcome to the site.

I would classify this shot as a "'tweener". Either stop the lens down more to get more DOF as freygr indicated. Or open the lens up to blow out the background. As is, it's right in the middle - so its impact is right in the middle.

After over 20 years shooting this sort of subject, I find getting great images of large flowers out in the field to still be quite difficult. You have to really focus on exactly what it is you want to capture, then execute it very decisively.

My advice: take pictures of smaller flowers with bugs on it (but then I'm a bug guy)

[julsoph]

Yep...I'd agree with the others on this one. The colors are beautiful though.

Emily

[hocy4life]

thanks everyone for the replies. sorry for the newbie question but, what is DOF stand for? thanks.

Arom

[payn817]

DOF= depth of field. It refers to the depth of focus. Using a more shallow DOF would have blurred the background so that the only thing your viewers eye would focus on is the stamen. Using a deeper DOF would have bought more of the flower into focus, and the entire flower would be the subject.

My guess is the stamen was the area you wanted to focus on (since the petals are cut off). Therefore you would use your lowest F-stop. For photos like this, I open up completely. Your colors are nice, and the bokeh is good though, so it is a good start. The thing is trying to figure exactly what you want others to see, and how to acheive that.