Bit of a last minute submission, was a very busy week, had a great idea for emotion, but the weather turned rancid! anyways this was a lot of fun to shoot.
I find on CRT (big computer monitor, instead of lcd laptop screen) there is far to much contrast that burns up the image.
The pure black background was simple black satin, cut the flower from dads garden, (with permission of course :)), and bought the glass at buck or two! lol enjoy!
focal length- 300mm, I dont have a macro lens but I find stand the telephoto a good distance back, on a tripod does the trick.
Statistics
Place: 160 out of 233 Avg (all users): 4.9659 Avg (commenters): 6.4000 Avg (participants): 4.9306 Avg (non-participants): 4.9904 Views since voting: 779 Views during voting: 226 Votes: 176 Comments: 7 Favorites: 1 (view)
i think what killed your score is the fact the flower is slightly out of focus and the drink is completly out of focus. hence you should have increased your aperture to improve your DOF.
another think you should have included all the glass.
great idea nonetheless, looking forward to see more of your work.
Well I didn´t vote in this challenge, truthfully if I had, I would probably have been one of those 5 votes you got and would have moved on to the next shot without commenting. The photo is not really bad but it´s just not really appealing to me either, it is promising though so definately keep at it.
First of all, it´s too dark for my personal taste, so dark it makes me wonder if your monitor is calibrated, can you see all the grayscale underneath pictures when you vote or do some of the squares seem the same to you? Secondly, I don´t really agree with the DOF in this picture, I do like that the glass in the backround is out of focus but I would have strongly preferred it if all of the flower was in focus, or if not, the center of the flower were in focus and the petals you chose to have in focus were not.
Lighting is probably the weakest part of the photo, lighting is so much the key to everything when you take still life photographs. If I were lighting the same subject, I probably would have used three lights, one on my right side with a softbox to light the subject from the front, one on my left side behind the subject giving off some backlighting, preferrably some kind of honeycomb grid with barn doors to control the spill of the light so none of it reaches the backround and I would probably use a third light from behind/to the right of me with a snoot or some kind of very narrow lighting to light up the coctail drink since large parts of it are pretty much solid black. That is what I would do anyway if I wanted the shot to look pretty much similar and with a black backround.
To make it simpler, you might just want to use a big window as lighting, preferrably facing north so you don´t get any direct sunlight in there, well assuming you live in the northern hemisphere. That would much rather be useful if you wanted a high key/out of focus look and is commonly used when taking pictures of food for cookbooks so this image would look totally different.
The last thing I want to mention is that your concept is not weak but very average and you usually need a stronger visual concept if you want to do well in challenges here at DPC. Just look at the red ribbon winner and you´ll know what I mean. Having a flower and then glass is so ordinary and cliche (wich is not always bad) that you really need to put some twist on it to score really well, otherwise most voters will do what they did, just give it a 4-6 rating and move on to the next picture without commenting.
Again I want to say this is promising so keep at it and you´ll do fine here :)
Image is a little on the dark side, but I guess that was on purpose as this probably wouldn't look as good if it was bright. I do, however, wish more of it was in focus. Such a close up shot leaves too much of the photo out of focus and none of the interest points are entirely in focus. Regardless of that, this is still one of my favorites of this challenge.
to blurred and to narrow and to dark this is personal. The focus is on the drops of the flower. Who knew stoping to taste the flowers could smel the drink. Good idea to combine the blue and reds.
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