Very nice composition!

Very nice! Different from the usual ship photo.

Thanks, Peter. Much appreciated.

Thank you very much for your nice comments, Ralf.

Thank you very much, Donovan.

If you are interested, may be we could meet up and go for a photoshoot if you have time and we can arrange it.

Thank you very much, Stefan.

The red rose was not in as good a condition as the yellow rose, plus is is much lower and I wouldn't have been able to get a similar shot as this, ie with another rose in the background.

Thank you for the nice comment, Maliska.

These are excellent shots, Ralph!! Superb, in fact!!

Those of you who may frequent DPR will/may know of Keitha McCall and her brilliant photos and post processing techniques - she really is very good! I decided to try my hand at a different way of post processing, not disimilar to Keitha's, in part. It is not the same, but in a similar vein by adding vignetting for a more dramatic look. I quite like the effect and it printed up and it really does look brilliant.

This was taken with the K-7 + FA77 @ f11, 1/80sec, ISO200, monopod SR on.

Unfortunately, the small size shown here does not really do it justice. The red rose to the right of the main subject was included as a sort of "reflected" or "duplicate" image as a background OOF subject matter.




The first time I shot this flower was the previous day and I used the DA*55. Unfortunately, it didn't appear as sharp as I would have liked, so I tried the FA77 with the same result, not quite as sharp as I would have liked. It was not much, just enough to take the edge off the result. So, it was not the lens. I really didn't think it was the DA*55 lens, as the DA*55 is super sharp (as is the FA77), but I justed wanted to make sure there was not some issue with the DA*55.

So, then I was then wondering if using SR with the monopod was the reason, so the next day I tried it without SR and they were very sharp. Just to make sure, I then tried again with SR and they were very sharp. So it wasn't the SR and monopod combo. It then occured to me that there was a very very slight almost imperceptible breeze when I first photographed the flower the previous day, so slight that I thought the shutter speed would negate the effect and also that I had waited until any breeze stopped before shooting. Not so! Even though I waited until any breeze had stopped there must have been enough resonance after the breeze stopped to just take the edge of the sharpenss.

So, the moral is to make sure that there is no breeze whatsoever even if you are shooting at 1/focal length x 1.5 and using a monopod or tripod. You really need a fast shutter or have complete stillness, which I am sure many of you already know. It's just that sometimes I/we can forget simple issues that impact on our results.

I usually leave SR on when using it on a monopod. Off on a tripod.