A nice picture, Pat. The details in the sepal and the stem are super. Nice background, too. As usual I would look for brighter areas, especially at the edges, and in this case I would darken down the bottom left of the picture.

The flower looks less sharp at the front. I find I sometimes fail to take the first picture of the bracket with the focus close enough to definitely get the closest part sharp. I wonder if that happened here. But I also sometimes find that yellow flowers in the sunshine look less clear than I would like, anyway. But the right hand petals are fine, so I suspect it the first explanation.   Posted: 10/09/2025 09:18:55

Nice treatment on the bud makes a lovely dreamy image. If it were mine I would tilt everything to the left, and give a tighter crop, so that a lot of the stem is taken out, and there is more concentration on the bud itself!   Posted: 10/09/2025 14:48:11

Beautifully done, Pat! Your background is so lovely, and the composition shows your flower off very well. On the bottom left, that stem is showing some either movement or artifacts? It is, coincidentally, the same area with the brighter area of green behind it, which draws my eye as a viewer directly toward it. If there's a way to fix that, terrific. I think Mike's idea of tilting the composition is worth a try. The overall capture is too good to just let that one thing detract from it.   Posted: 10/17/2025 04:41:16