During a walk along a "levada" at Madeira island, my wife liked some flowers and I happily obliged with a couple of snapshots. Back at home, while processing the files I thought perhaps there was some potential in them, and began experimenting: instead of the classic route of soft, light, and saturated images, I tried the opposite direction: dark, hard contrast, and desaturated tones. I liked the result, and did a bit of post-processing more, just to remove the background; this is what I got.

These pictures are special for me, because of the lesson they teach: sometimes, less is more. Those flowers did not impress me when I saw them, I did nothing special to photograph them, and did not spend a lot of time retouching the images. However, the more I took from them (colour, softness, background, ...), the more I liked them; these out-of-context flowers are interesting precisely because of their out-of-context status.

For the curious, both pictures were taken with a Canon 400D camera and a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens; exposure time was 1/125 and 1/200, diaphragm at f/2.0, and sensitivity at ISO-100; available light and no tripod. Processed with RawTherapee and post-processed with GIMP.

I like the non-obvious approach you took. Well done.

Re the two pictures specifically. I find the first a bit "messy" with less structure as the second. Therefore I find the arrangement of the flowers in second more pleasing, except for the strange unsharp halo near the top of the flowers, which I just do not like at all. The contrasty B&W conversion on both works well, really puts a lot of emphasis on the texture and nerves of the petals.

Hope this helps.

I agree. Other than the haloing effect in the second shot, I think you did a nice job. For some reason, I like B&W flowers. I think it's because without color, you can focus more on the physical structure. You captured some nice light here as well.

I agree also. The second is the better image, but the approach is well executed in both samples.

Mike.

Next time I will try to pay more attention to the arrangement, and look for more subjects to choose the ones with the best composition. In this occasion, I just took a couple of photographs, big mistake. I also dislike the halo effect on the second one; initially I was reluctant to remove it, because it is real lens blur (not added during post-processing). I have decided to mask it out, but unfortunately the result so far has been very poor, even worse than the original; will keep trying...

Thank you very much for you comments.

Finally, I could spend some time on the second picture, trying to correct the halos; lots of patience later, here is the result.

That is a pantburstingly good photo.