[luis garcia]

this photo was take with clouse up filter and estencion tubes

Attached Images

View Picture EXIF

File Date

 

[Na Horuk]

Very interesting composition, almost abstract. And wonderful colours and shapes. With flower photography you usually need to make sure the stamen and pistil are sharp and in-focus. Sometimes that is very difficult because the DoF is so shallow when you come close. I see you already took the photo at f22 to help with that, and a large part of it is in-focus, but this particular flower makes it difficult! But I would like to see the part hanging out in the front to also be in focus. Maybe focus stacking is the only way to achieve this.
But other than this thought, I think the photo is stunning and dreamy! Showing a whole little world inside a violet flower

[TaoMaas]

With flower photography you usually need to make sure the stamen and pistil are sharp and in-focus. Sometimes that is very difficult because the DoF is so shallow when you come close.

What he says is correct. Overall, I like the composition, the colors, and the exposure...but the sharpness is off for me. If you wanted a soft-focus effect, you needed to go farther. If not, it needs to be sharper. Were you using a tripod? If not, you should...especially for this type of shot. And...if you were...I found out the hard way that there are ranges where even a tripod doesn't always help. Looks like you shot this at 1/10th of a second. When shooting between about 1/8th and 1/15th of a second...with extreme telephoto or extreme macro...even with a tripod, shots can be vulnerable to camera shake due to the flop of the mirror and even the movement of the shutter. I'm not saying it's impossible to get a sharp shot under those conditions because I'm sure lots of folks could post pics to prove me wrong. All I'm saying is that you have to be extra mindful of your technique in that range...remote release, mirror lock-up, solid tripod...that kind of thing.

[Bruce Clark]

As others have stated you really need to consider which parts you need in focus. One technique that can be effective is to move away from the subject slightly and then crop to get the desired composition. You will gain some depth of field at the cost of resolution. A 50mm lens focused at 0.5m has a depth of field of approx 0.08m, moving out to 0.8m, the depth of field becomes 0.22m, quite a useful bit extra. Website Online Depth of Field Calculator can give useful information using various combinations of camera, lens, focus distance, f stop and depth of field.

Apart from camera movements, flowers themselves are very prone to movement due to wind currents which will show up at 1/10th of a second. Personally I do most of my flower photos handheld at 1/250 sec @ f11 or thereabouts. Pentax's TAV mode is very useful for this.if noise becomes a problem, this can be effectively treated in post processing.