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.

[shootme]

Nice shots to bring out the flower with the sky as background. The first shot seems a tad out of focus (seems like you've touched up the edges a bit?), though that might just be my lousy eyesight, the second could have had more contrast to see the center of the sunflower better. Maybe getting in front (just a little more) of the first one could have added something? S

[Frog]

I don't know why you wanted to get "blowing in the breeze" effect. If you did you sort of succeeded as nothing seems to be in focus so I guess the flower was moving.

[freygr]

I feel the angle is wrong, with the first shot being soft.

[InOmaha]

Hey, thanks for the replies.

I can see what everyone is saying about the first picture being out of focus. The main reason for getting this new camera was to take better sports pictures of the kids, but it turns out to be more than a little addictive taking other pictures as I've been learning. With the first picture I was trying to figure out the best methods of eliminating blur on a moving object as it got closer to sunset (about the time of soccer games).

Both angles were due to the sun setting behind me and the surrounding buildings and trees showing up in the background.

I've been reading and practicing over the last couple of weeks and slowly improving.

Again, thanks.