Through this past weekend onto next weekend is the Lilac Festival in Rochester NY. And of course the Lilac are blooming here, they are one of my favorite flowers, I love the scent they fill the air with. Although the weather wasn't particularly nice yesterday, we still packed up the kids and drove to Rochester to see the lilac and enjoy the festival.

These are from our own lilac in the front yard:



The rest of these are from the Festival in Rochester:

[roentarre]

Very nice colour in your images here.

[kevinschoenmakers]

Flower pictures are usually more pleasing, I think, with a shallower depth of focus (IE: taken with a bigger aperture). For example, picture 1 has so much flowers in focus the picture becomes chaotic. Choosing a bigger aperture creates a shallower depth of focus, resulting in more flowers out of focus which quiets down the picture, making it more pleasing.

As a result, try finding flowers that more or less stand alone, so you can have the flower and only the flower in focus, and the rest as a pleasant blur around it, thus focussing your view on the flower and on nothing else. I would therefor think picture 2 wasn't really a suitable flower to capture, the leaves around it are the same distance away from the camera, and will thus always be in focus, creating distraction.

[madmikess]

Thank you for the critique. I agree with your assessment but thinking about the Lilac in general I wanna say that the flower is more or less a group shot if you will and I don't know if it would have the desired effect to single out one flower in the group. But I see where you are coming from. The pansy display however, I probably could have zeroed in on an out of place flower as there were some that were in the wrong place so to speak in the pattern. Thank you for the advice though, much appreciated.