My housemate started growing a few plants in our sideyard where I like to hang out with my dog sometimes, shot this in the morning a few days ago. I liked the colors and framing of the central stalk (if that’s what it’s called…?) by the other two which are out of focus.
Anything! 
Is the vignette too strong? Any way it can be improved?
Is this a composite: No
1/125s
f/5.6
ISO 100
50mm
Hi Matthew (or do you prefer Matt? My brother does!) -
Looks like you’ve got the beginning of a nice shot here. The fence has the potential to make for an excellent background if you can isolate one of these stems. As it is, it’s a little busy for a tight crop like this. In general, including a lot of environmental extras besides your subject requires a couple of things - a wider angle or a much shallower depth of field. Especially with flowers that have lots of small blossoms in a cluster or group. The vignette looks ok, but the exposure could come up some. The colors are quite complementary and I can only imagine what all of them look like at peak blossoming time.
Oh and could you upload a slightly smaller picture next time? The longest edge should be 3000 pixels or less - it’s easier on the servers. Thanks in advance!
Good eye. You did see some lovely colors. The vignette looks fine. Good suggestions by Kris.
Thanks @Kris_Smith and @David_Leroy for the kind words and critique! I agree that the exposure was a bit dark, raised it up a bit. Kris, I was wondering if you could expand a bit on the comment about using a wider angle / shallower depth of field? It seems like both suggestions are designed to further isolate the subject? edit: also, thanks for the pointer about the image size, will keep it in mind!
Got it in one.
Oh fine, make me put my money where my mouth is, lol.
If you don’t mind my photos in your thread, I’ll use a few to illustrate what I mean.
If we go with the premise that we want to showcase or highlight our flower subjects we need to isolate them somehow. Commonly done by selecting a single blossom on its own as I’ve done here. I also used a wider aperture to throw everything else out of focus -
You can see the one I want you to see, but the other plants are not distracting. This was shot with a telephoto macro lens. Telephoto by its very nature will flatten depth of field and give you better separation in a crowded scene. But you can do something similar with a wider view if you keep your subject close to you and in sharp focus.
Under the right circumstances (and this isn’t quite it) you can do the same thing with a smaller aperture and get more in focus (deeper depth of field), but it requires even more careful scene selection and composition management.
And since you have that fence as a background, here’s what I mean about using it, these Indian Pipe were growing about an inch from a big pine tree -
So I hope that helps. Feel free to keep firing away with questions.
@Kris_Smith thanks for the added context! And it’s actually very helpful to see examples of what you were talking about 
I will have to keep trying at floral composition. It’s not something I’ve really put conscious thought into up until now, more like ‘oh, a pretty flower, let’s shoot it’ xD But I definitely see where you’re coming from with the suggestions to isolate the subject! Thank you for all the feedback!
