Pasture Thistle, Cirsium horridulum/ Nikon F90x, Nikon 200mm micro. Sensia. Cropped top and bottom.

-- Donna P. Bollenbach (cassidy@icubed.net), July 17, 1999

Answers

I think that the slide of this image is probably beautiful, but the amount of compression necessary to post a 50k jpeg has made it look a little funny. It's just all the straight lines and detail... Anyway, I think that the shot is good, but I would like it even better if the "flower" were either pointing toward the bottom right hand of the image or if it were placed in the bottom left hand somehow. Also, flash might be a little hot. Hope you didn't prick yourself! Keep it up...

-- Joe Cheatwood (cheatwoo@ufl.edu), July 21, 1999.

Joe, you are absolutely right, I lost a lot of detail and sharpness in the compression. This photo had to be compressed at less than 50% quality to achieve less than 50 megs. I'm not sure that you mean about the flower pointing toward the bottom right but if I had not cropped the top than it would be a little lower in the botom left of the frame. I'll look at it again. Thanks much for your response, like you I would rather hear constructive criticism than nothing at all. Donna

-- Donna Bollenbach (cassidy@icubed.net), July 21, 1999.

I think Joe meant that he'd prefer there to be a majority of the "extra space" in the direction that the flower is "pointing". As cropped here, the flower is higher than the center, and pointing up. This draws the eye above the flower, where there isn't much photo left. Of course, to redo or recrop the picture so that there's more space in front of the opened flower than behind it, you'd have to crop out a lot of the green thorny detail below, which is an interesting part of the plant too. This picture gives more or less equal weight to the flower and to the green thorny stuff, which probably makes for a less ideal composition than if the picture emphasized one or the other.

That said, it's a beautiful flower among a bed of nasty spikes, which comes across well. There's a lot of interesting detail. It's better than any picture of a thistle I've ever taken.

-- John Sullivan (sullivan@spies.com), July 22, 1999.

Nice colors and detail.

-- Larry Korhnak (lvk@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu), July 23, 1999.