Toadflax with Repost

This is beautiful, Tom! That BG is so nicely colored and blurred; it works so well with the flower. IMHO I think a crop up from the bottom to just above where the 2 leaves are directly across from each other and below the right orange dot would work great. However, it is wonderful also as is. Nice job!

Sweet shot, maybe for my taste to bright I would like to see little more creativity with composition.... Thank you for sharing!

Tom, I like the composition for this particular flower, and I love the colors. I would probably make the background a bit darker so the flower stands out more.

Thanks for the input! The original shot was a lot darker, and I felt it looked a bit "gloomy". I've posted it here with the suggested crop.

I usually stick to birds and other wildlife, so have no idea on floral composition. Should I be looking at placing the blooms more off-center or use the rule of thirds, etc?

Lots to learn...

Tom, the repost is great! In flora sometimes things are centered, and I think this one is fine centered, but I'll let Pat and/or Bill address that question more fully, because I don't want to say the wrong thing. ;)

Tom, the repost is a big improvement in focusing on the flower. When you've got nothing else in the frame and the flower is well balanced right/left I suspect that moving it off center would be a distraction, of course the final answer is try it and see what YOU like.

I think the repost is stronger Tom.

As regards composition for portraits, I'd agree with Mark. I think it's a matter of what you like. I think flora subjects are a lot like birds actually. I usually think of them as facing a certain direction and try to put extra space on that side. This one seems to be looking out at me and I'm fine with it centered but you could also put the bloom at a power point. I think part of it is the way the flower strikes you and part of it what you want to emphasize. Is it tall and thin with symmetry around a vertical axis, is it more circular with radial symmetry, is it a series of shapes that look more interesting on the diagonal. How much attention do you want the bloom to get versus the stem? Do you like the bg or do you need to keep it out of the image? How much dof do you want. With birds I'd pretty much always set my f stop at 5.6 unless the bird was pretty close then I might go up to f/8 to try and make sure he was all in focus.

Composition is the hardest part of photography for me. The nice thing is that the subject is usually still enough that you have time to think about it.

Hi Tom The repost is stronger, And the composition is fine for this shape of plant, You and your 300mmlens really make sublime backgrounds! The comp, color and light are all in harmony
Albert Darmo
abstractland, canada

Textbook perfect, Tom. No suggestions from me, just beautiful as posted

Lovely image.

Tom:
Just beautiful. I actually prefer the original post with its dreamy brighter bg. Well done.

Another vote for the cropped darker repost.

Tom: The repost is just superb although I do like the original. I like your comp choices with this subject and pretty much ditto Pat's comments in that regard. Very nice work.>=))>