Purple flowers

[QuietOne]

Yeah, not the most original title. I think I'm looking more for commentary than anything else. I'm not sure what I think of this one. The smoke was gone that day, so the light was a lot cleaner than it's been in a while. Bright, midday sun (when else do I shoot? ) I ran across a thread once discussing purple flowers - specifically, that some of them aren't reflecting purple, they're reflecting blue and red. I think these are examples of that. Most of them were a bluish purple, but scattered among them were some that were leaning towards a reddish purple (more mature ones, perhaps?) I had to yank the exposure back, so definitely some of the detail was blown (wasn't one of my better days. My coworker was on vacation again, and the weird stuff showed up immediately and blew a number of systems up). Thoughts? Comments?

[Mad Aussie]

Stop whining ... it's a very good shot

[Marko]

Hmmm - Tricky image imo... I like it overall but here goes a small critique.
Seems to me the intended focal point are the two purple flowers vertically stacked at mid- left. To my eye though, those flowers compete with the much more colourful and lighter toned green flowers at left. I really like those tones mind you, but they are stealing the show.
For me this causes the image to feel unbalanced and i might try to burn in that area maybe 20-25% so that it commands less attention.
Hope that may help -

[belliveau]

im agreeing with marko on this one. it would also be nice to have another colour to split the foreground with the back ground.

[QuietOne]

Thank you, MA. I did lean towards wanting to like it. I just wasn't quite there.

Marko, I tried burning it, but there's just nothing there in a couple of spots, so it was an ugly mess. I switched to cloning a couple spots, bringing the lower corner down, bringing everything else up just a hair, and warming the color a little more. Seems to work better; see what you think. To add to the info, I was messing with close-up filters again. The plant is lobelia. This particular type is a very low growing ground cover. The flower is about 3/4 inches wide, and it doesn't grow much higher than 3 inches.

belliveau, this was ground cover. There isn't a second color, and I'm not up yet to doctoring sections of a photo that way.