Day 158: Pearlescent Pink

This is not bad for about 5 shots taken very quickly with my compact camera on the way past a flower bed.  They caught my eye because they were shining in this pretty pearlescent sort of way.  It wasn't particularly easy getting a good shot though because of where the sun was - if I tried a head on shot I cast my shadow over them - and because the compact camera has atrocious depth of field which makes side ways shots difficult.  You can see in the bottom left hand corner where it starts getting fuzzy and it got a lot worse.  One of the things I have discovered though, while doing this project, is that you can salvage a shot that hasn't turned out as well as you would have liked by cropping it and not being afraid to try rather different crops than you would normally consider.

To give you an idea of what I started off with this is the original that I took the crop from (click on it to make it bigger).  To get the photo above I have chopped off half the flower, and most of the background, where before I might have taken some of the background away to make the flower more of a focal point, but I would have said "Oh, that could have been good" and discarded it because I couldn't have the whole flower.  It's yet another way I am having to train myself to use my eyes more to look for something interesting, be it to get the original photo, or to get a crop that achieves the focal point you would have wanted originally through the camera.