How can I improve this shot?

I took this shot the other day. When I looked at it, I was aghast.

I struggled with it, taking several shots and they all came out looking the same.

The front half is all washed out.

I was in aperture priority mode and just sort accepted the camera's decision to set the shutter speed at roughly two times the focal length. Was a shutter speed of 1/125 too low, or the 400ISO too high?

I thought about spot metering on the leaves in front, or using a negative exposure compensation. Do you have any advice for me?

Steve Thomas

stevet1 wrote:

I took this shot the other day. When I looked at it, I was aghast.

I struggled with it, taking several shots and they all came out looking the same.

The front half is all washed out.

I was in aperture priority mode and just sort accepted the camera's decision to set the shutter speed at roughly two times the focal length. Was a shutter speed of 1/125 too low?

I thought about spot metering on the leaves in front, or using a negative exposure compensation. Do you have any advice for me?

Steve Thomas

As with any of my advice, it's "for what it's worth" (and it's certainly easier to "armchair quarterback" than make the shot myself) but since you asked... 

First, there's no strong compositional focal point. The yellow flowers are ostensibly it (being a different color) but they don't have quite enough visual weight. Light-wise it's better but the foreground is too bright as you indicated. IMO, flowers always "sing" the best when they're up close and personal, unless it's field view.

Suggestions?

• Composition: Come in closer on the yellow flowers, most likely the two together. The third one IMO is too far away to work compositionally. Also move up just a tad to avoid the foreground greenery from overlapping the flower. One idea is below but there are pretty much infinite cropping options. If the image quality will support it, you can always crop some more now.
  
• Use a wider aperture to blur the background more and provide some separation, however, you'll need to be very careful with focus and use zoomed-in live view and f/stop preview to see what's truly in focus. You'll have to experiment to find the largest aperture possible and still get the focus you need. If you can select everything but the yellow flowers (with a parametric mask or similar) you could carefully add a little blur to the background to help drop it back. As with all such techniques it needs to be subtle and clean or it'll look super fake.
• Light: It might have been possible to find a position that would include more of the dark background instead of the brighter foreground, dunno. But now since it's shot, you could put a slightly darker gradient and/or vignette to suppress the edges and bring out the yellow flowers. Be careful not to make it too strong, though or it'll look obvious. Also, if your software can do it, you might bring the luminance down on just those yellow-green shades in the foreground, but be careful not to kill your yellow petals in the process.

I'd also recommend using a tripod if possible. At least in my experience it makes fiddling with all the settings and such easier when I'm not having to hand-hold the camera. I can back away, look around, etc., without losing my composition.

As indicated, all are just my opinions...

Len Philpot wrote:

As with any of my advice, it's "for what it's worth" (and it's certainly easier to "armchair quarterback" than make the shot myself) but since you asked...

First, there's no strong compositional focal point. The yellow flowers are ostensibly it (being a different color) but they don't have quite enough visual weight

• Composition: Come in closer on the yellow flowers, most likely the two together.

Len

No. Thanks. I did ask,and your suggestions were good.

That's the thing about the flowers. They're not yellow. Those Tiger Lillies are orange. I fiddled with the White Balance to try and bring out that orange, but it didn't help.

In the end, I think the leaves in front were in the sunshine, and the background was in shade. I had the camera in Auto ISO and I think it set the ISO too high trying to balance everything out. I think I should have just spot metered on the light foreground and let the background go dark; or do like you said and just isolated the flowers more.

Steve Thomas

In a general sense, I would fiddle with WB only if the overall color balance is off. Once that's correct, leave the WB alone and do localized "artistic" color adjustments with other less global tools. As you discovered, tweaking colors with WB will affect the entire image.

I'm not sure what you're processing it with, but I can't advise re: Lightroom since I don't use it.