I would recommend a re-shoot with expanded DOF and less noise, with an emphasis on not showing space between the petals.

Also, you might try using an off camera flash at the side, to add some shadow and texture to the image. #10260258

I love the drops. #10260583

In other words, when the focus is shallow, it's important to be at a 90 degree angle from the entire subject. If you are tilted slightly, the shallow DOF will result in some areas sharp and some soft because some area will be further away.

With todays cameras with their high pixed count, there is nothing wrong with using a crop to get what you want.

In your last sample, it appears to have enough DOF, it's just that the entire image is a little soft. I've taken the liberty of applying some focus correction and you can see that the correction is equal over all the image.

Mike and Stephen can give you better info on lens choice etc. for future efforts. #10262499

The longer the lens, the closer the subject, and the more open the lens (f5.6 vs f11) the narrower the DOF. So to increase or decrease DOF change one or more of the above.

Dale is correct in that moving back a little and making a crop will help because of the 2nd factor above. You have to balance that so that you don't move to far back that your crop will be below the camera resolution. Also his advice of keeping your subject parallel to the plane of the camera (specifically the sensor) is also very important when dealing with narrow DOF.

I think Dale's sample just applying a bit of sharpening looks good. So you took a great shot and just needed one more step in post processing to make it look the best possible. #10262567

One thing I've learned is that shooting close subjects like this is incredibly frustrating. I've been shooting water drops and flowers and wanted to pull my hair out. Keep practicing, you're getting there. I love Daisy 3, and Dale's sharpening really helped. :) #10264038

In the case of your re-shoot, Elaine, my preference would be to emphasize Dale's "you need to be as perpendicular as possible" to you subject. Otherwise you increase the need for deep DOF more than might be necessary. However, even that becomes a photographer's conscious decision depending on your compositional intent.

But I think there is an additional lens consideration that hasn't been brought up, and is the reason why Mike shoots with the 100mm f2.8 Macro lens. It is simply one of the "gold standard" lenses in Canon's line-up of macro/close-up lenses. I may be off base here since I don't know Nikon lens lines or what you are using, but lens quality becomes increasingly important as you start to need to bring out detail in these close-up flower shots. You may just simply be working at the limits of your equipment. I simply can't take the same quality picture with my old Tamron 28-200 macro (that I bought to use on an Elan 2e film camera) mounted on my Canon 5D Mark II than I can with the Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro.

When I first opened up this re-shoot image on my work computer and monitor, I thought the image was incredibly sharp and had a hard time understanding Dale's initial response. It looked pretty good to me -- especially the single drop hanging off the petal in the bottom left corner. Astounding. I love this picture for that one detail.

To me, Dale's sharpening helped the center of the blossom on the upper left corner, but not the rest of it. Maybe he applied the sharpening selectively to accommodate his reference to camera tilt.

Quite frankly, I don't see that his sharpening helped that any. Of course, he is working from a screen capture. So I think I'd very much like to see a sharpened version from the full image, since you don't mention that you did any sharpening yourself in posting this picture.

I envy your diligence in working on your technique. I don't do nearly enough of that. I'm with Teresa on that score. Water drops are frustrating. Still I prefer the composition of your original post with the little area of strong color contrast.

#10265736