Found this blossom in one of the hanging baskets at Pickering Farm in Issaquah Washington one evening last month around dusk.
This image was taken with my Panasonic GF-1 and the Leica f1.7 20mm lens (40 mm equivalent on a 35mm format camera). Shooting with this lens is interesting: when the focus is good the image is amazing. Unfortunately I'm still learning the DOF prisms and close focusing distances for the wide apertures on this particular lens, so this image isn't quite all I had hoped it would be in that department.
It's also been a while since I did one of my full on flower portraits so this one took a bit longer than usual to process and still needs a little more work. I'm still working through whether I like substantial sharpening in LR before moving into PS and before the b/w conversion. The jury is still out on that method and this image is a prime example of why: it seems both oversharpened in some areas and somewhat soft in others. The grain seems a bit stronger than usual when sharpening is done in this manner as well. It's hard make a decision based on just this image because of the DOF and close focusing distance issues in the actual RAW file. More testing is needed but, for the moment at least, I'm leaning away from much more than a minimal pass at sharpening in LR at this point.
From a compositional point of view it's a little static. It *feels* like you should turn the image clock-wise ninety degrees but then the light direction gets non-intuitive. For now, I'm leaving a large chunk of negative space off to the right to balance the composition and to give some breathing room to the little buds heading off to the right and bottom.
Still not a bad image at small sizes. I'll be doing a little more work on this image (mainly some dodging and burning) but I'm not sure a rework from the roots up would do much to improve it overall, given the problems with the DOF prism and relative softness at the center of the blossom.
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