In the interest of shorter loading times, I'm going to post photos here in the future, so here goes.

All of these are really great. Keep up the good work.

As usual, they look very cool
These two are my favorites of the ones you just posted.

amazing as usual phoenix! wouldn't expect anything less

those power lines are killing me

Agreed, but I'm not so good at cloning stuff out like that, so my excuse is that I like the contrast they provide

How did you do it? It looks kinda splotchy, but I assume you didn't spend that much time on it.

I just selected it and used CS5's content aware fill, 5 seconds of work.. didn't feel like touching it up

I suspected that might be it, but I'm still using CS4. I can do a decent job with clone tool, but it's quite a pain to make it look good.

Speaking of CS5, any other notable features for photography purposes?

yeah there's a bunch I'm loving it...

my favorite of the new features is their upgraded HDR processing, they made it a billion times better and I no longer have to use a third party program to compile my HDR pictures

they also upgraded their whole camera raw workspace and the image processing thru it is way better

oo one more thing i like to is their automatic lens correction which fixes distortions n such in a second

there's a bunch of other new features but those are my favorite photography ones.. also puppet warp, that is ridiculous amounts of fun

Four more. And not even any power lines rhk.









Always nice to hear which ones you love/hate/whatever.

The first pic has some really nice colors, and I like the contrast between the branches in the foreground to the bright background... but that blurry branch in the center kinda kills the picture...

The second is very blurry...

The last two could also be great shots but you seem to have a very narrow focus point on your camera and that doesn't really work when taking macro plant pictures, there are some cases when it does work but your subject in the picture takes priority from everything else, esp with the blurred background.


all in all they could be some great shots, but you jsut need to get more comfortable with your camera and work on focal points

(just a bit of constructive criticism)

For the first one, agreed with the branch. I prolly shoulda gotten out the chainsaw or something, but wasn't even thinking about it when I shot Also of interest, I had to flip it left/right in PS.

For the second one I was going for a pinhole camera look...

For the last two, I prolly would have used a slightly smaller aperature had it been less dark out, but I think I got the important bits in focus. For some reason, I have never really liked flower shots where everything is sharp.

Focusing on one part of a flower does look great as well, but I do think yours are still too narrow focused, the top perspective doesnt really play well on the last image, If you went more level with the plant and got more of a profile shot I think it would look very nice... The one above that is just an odd focus area it's kinda sporadic, If it was just focused on the center of the flower and maybe the top peddel it would be more appealing... But It's fucking hard to take macro pictures, esp with a small lcd display on a dslr, when I take macro pictures I usually shoot 5-10 of the same subject adjusting the focus here and there.. but that's just my thoughts, you're doing great work keep it up

Same here, and usually the cool looking things happen to blowing around in the wind, without enough light to get more depth of field

I usually like to go with natural light, but maybe I should try flash more. It looks like all three of yours were with flash, right? I like the black background with the second one.
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I really hate wind It ruins my HDR pictures, even the slightest movement and I get ghosting everywhere

But yeah it's with a flash to get the black background effect, I didn't really like it at first because it kinda looks like a picture of a flower in a studio with a black backdrop, but idk I've come to like the effect

To do it you gotta use very high aperture & flash and make sure nothing in the background is reflective or super close to the subject, or else that ruins it..