Spider Lily

Original image, converted straight from RAW @200dpi.

I think your processing here is great Alan - I think you excluded the elements that should have been excluded. I think the bloom is very interesting, but it looks like a tough one to shoot. Nice job showing the character of the bloom.

Nathan

You did a nice job in post-processing, creating an aesthetically pleasing composition.

A great looking flower, Alan. You did a good job getting the image to here. My suggestion would be to do something with that bright veg coming in from the RH side. I would either clone it out or darken it up. It's too bright for this photo and pulls the eye over there.

That is a very interesting looking flower with the stamens all coming from the outside instead of the center of the flower. Good detail in the larger version and I like the contrast, way to go.

Nicely done. The flower itself is exquisite, and you really brought that out in your final image. It's so delicate and you did a good job with color and keeping the detail in the whites.
I'm no expert on doing flora shots, but I sure see some great ones on here. The people who are really good at closeup flowers shots like this have a knack for seeing all the things that SHOULDN'T be there, and doing what they can to remove or minimize them before taking the photo.
Imagine how incredible this flower would look it the flower itself was in fairly bright light, but the rest of the plant, and the other vegetation around it was in darkness. That flower would practically pop out of the image. As the other commenters noted, you already removed or fixed the big things. You've got a really good flower, it's fixing those other distracting things that would make this even more fantastic. I think you could still darken the other parts of the plant that are fairly bright, especially that bright stem going off to the right.
It would have been interesting to see if you could have positioned yourself so that the petals of the flower did NOT intersect with the other vertical parts of the flower. I also wonder if you could crop it more, to really focus on the flower.
Nice one; the large image is a dandy!

Hi Alan I see a great improvement from the original shot.. the processing is very.good. but to me the composition still has too much background.


Albert Darmo.. Canada

The differences and similarities between this flower and my post are fascinating. The web site I used for ID limited its distribution to Florida, but it's very clear that identifying the different spider lilies at the species level is a huge challenge. In fact, you probably need to be a botanist and have dissected the flower to be certain of the species ID. You've got excellent sharpness on the flower and its long sepals and your processing lets the flower take center stage. It would be nice not to have that second bud touching the frame. One way of dealing with it here would be to significantly burn in that stem. Then it wouldn't attract as much attention.