Orchid beauty

Carole's orchid is still full of flowers, several weeks after first blooming, and it's crying out for its picture to be taken again and again. For this shot I first photographed the full flower, but when I looked at it on the computer later I realised I'd not thought about the background properly, and that it was the vivid colours at the flower's centre which was much the better picture.


It shows that sometimes the best photo is within the photo, but the downside of extracting your picture this way is that you're throwing away so much of the original image - so I could never print this at a large size and hang it on the wall as there's just not enough pixels left to work with. The original picture was taken at 3888x2592 resolution, big enough for a reasonably sized canvas print for the wall. But after cropping it down, all I'm left with is a photo at 730x730, barely enough for a 6" x 6" print.

A much better idea is to zoom in with the camera, so that the part of the subject you're interested in fills the frame and makes use of the full resolution of the camera. By this time though the light had gone, so for this little project I'll have to try again another day!