Hi Jane…
One thing that is worth remembering in photography is that at the end of the day, it is all about personal expression and there is no right or wrong. Personal expression is just that… it is personal and so what works for you might not work for another person because they are not you. Simple, eh!
Anyway, with that fact in mind there are probably going to be people out there thinking that this is a really underexposed photograph! Then there will be people who, like myself, will look upon this as an image from the “Dark Blue” period in your photographic career.
Personally, there are two things I would do to this image to get people thinking.
The first is to lighten the detail in the middle of this photograph. In the example below I selected the centre of the flower using the elliptical marquee tool in Photoshop and then went to Adjustments > Shadow/Highlights and moved the Shadow slider to about 35% to brighten just the centre of the flower. To add some interest to the image I then used the same circular selection to adjust the Hue of the image (Adjustments > Hue / Saturation)… I shifted it by 180 degrees to convert the blue centre into a dark yellow centre.
And the second thing that I changed… I made it
vertical… it looks stronger now.
One last thing. You mentioned that you had the camera in a low-res setting when
you made this photo. Given the chance, if you are making photos for the art of
photography you should always be working in full-resolution RAW mode. At least then you
will have significantly more control over the image then you will get from a
JPEG. The only thing is, if you start working in RAW at some stage you will need to get some image management software, such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture. You will get there though... I think your images deserve it.
Cheers,
Anthony
Image Doctor's edited version
