A White Rose that had been feed red food coloring to dye the veins. Took a lose petal and took the image with a supermacro lense while the petal was sitting on a mirror in a dark room so the flash would help make the veins stand out by making the rest of it seem translucent. Used Sharp then neat image, then cropped image to help file size and focus of subject
Statistics
Place: 394 out of 432 Avg (all users): 4.0890 Avg (commenters): 3.6667 Avg (participants): 3.7842 Avg (non-participants): 4.3873 Views since voting: 761 Views during voting: 363 Votes: 281 Comments: 12 Favorites: 0
First impressions on this give me a sense of wonder. The reflection of the rose petal with the mirror gives it a sense of being a clam shell.
I noticed that you used an aperture of 4.3 on this. This gives a shallow depth of field. This is good to make the focus fade out as it goes back. When you use this, you need to make sure that you have the DOF exactly where you want it to be. Unfortunately I think that it is a bit shallow, as the reflection in the mirror lies outside the focus.
In reading your description, I can see that you went through some work to get the petal to have some red coloring. Unfortunately it ended up looking like it had the mumps. A much tighter crop or zoom in more to focus on just a section of the petal may help to show the veins that you were wanting to highlight.
The picture itself seems like it needs a little anti-clockwise rotation to help level it.
Probably what hurt the most for this is that this challenge was asking for a "Branch" and what we see in this photo is only a petal of a flower. This is a bit of a stretch for most voters on DPChallenge, and it shows in the score that you received.
Don't give up, keep shooting, you will see your score improve as you do it more and more.
Overall Impression: I have to agree with the voters, in that this would be either a 3 or a 4 on my own voting scale. A tighter crop and a little more DOF may bump it up to a 5.
If you have any questions on this critique, feel free to PM me.
May have been more intersting if you zoomed in on it so all that you could see were the branches. Maybe you could have also figured out a way to backlight it to make it even more dramatic.
Out of focus, and there seems to be camera movement as well. The veins seem to be a tenuous link to start with and aren't prominent in this composition.
I'm not sure this quite meets the challenge, but I'm going to assume it does since you did. What I like: unique subject. What I think needs work: Not sure what your goal was with this image. The lighting is flat and the DPF short. Looks interesting but a little more contrast would help.
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