http://www.flickr.com/groups/1209617@N23/ This group is meant to be a collection of exceptional 'portraits' and 'abstracts' of flowers and plants. ORIGINAL WORK ONLY The objective is to showcase not only the qualities in the flowers themselves such as color, structure and form, but IMPORTANTLY to showcase the mastery of the photographer and his/her technique. You should display strong composition skills, good control of tonal range, control of depth of field, and a good knowledge of digital processing WITHOUT the use of cheezy photoshop tricks. We're looking for striking images, not simply pretty ones. The submissions need to be predominantly focused on the flowers or plants with as few distractions as possible. The most obvious way to do this is to zoom right in on the plant, but that is only one of many options. You can try isolating the subject from the background using focus, a plain background, or strong light/dark contrast between figure and ground. Or experiment with contrast of large vs small, plain vs complex, textured vs smooth, and of course colour: contrast, complement, analogous colour schemes - or may be greyscale will work best? You can also try changing the point of view - above instead of below? - or the back instead of the front. Sometimes, putting the subject in an unexpected context makes for a very interesting image. This group will be heavily curated with an eye to keeping the standards very high. Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:30:46 -0700 Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:30:46 -0700 http://www.flickr.com/ http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3452/buddyicons/1209617@N23.jpg?1250609550 http://www.flickr.com/groups/1209617@N23/