Texas Wildflower Season is starting...

So I've been checking the wildflower reports for the area and it sounded like things were finally starting to take off even though the peak is probably a few weeks away still. So I headed out to Washington County to have a look for myself yesterday. The skies were heavy overcast, no way I was going to get any decent landscape shots so I mostly just scouted locations that I might want to return to in better conditions. Looks like this year's bloom will be pretty good, definately better than last years.

I did get a few close-up shots that I was relatively happy with. As always comments/critiques welcome.

NIKON D2X    ---    400mm    f/6.3    1/80s    ISO 100

NIKON D2X    ---    170mm    f/5.6    1/160s    ISO 100

NIKON D2X    ---    190mm    f/8.0    1/30s    ISO 100

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Thanks Sabina.

 

Andy, Tom, and Sandi - thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. Definitely seems to be a consensus forming around shot #3.

Tim - Thanks. I like the first one too, the subject isolation is what works for me in that one.

 

Dianne - Thanks. The first was shot with the 200-400vr + extension tube. The second was with the 70-200vr + extension tube, and the last was just the 70-200vr. If you click on any of the images it will take you to the gallery page with full EXIF info. BTW the wildflowers in Washington/Austin Counties should be peaking in the next week or two.

Rich/Pat and jryoung1947 - thanks for the feedback, I appreciate the kind words.

 

Thanks for the kind words, Roosje. I appreciate the feedback.

 

Tiarra, Gretchen and Dave - Thanks for looking and commented, I appreciate it.

Ruben - Thanks. The original exposure didn't have any clipping, but I went back and checked my PSD (which is 16-bit ProPhoto), and soft-proofing shows that the image definitely exceeds the gamut of sRGB. So I probably should have desaturated a bit before converting for the web. Amazingly, the PSD is within the gamut of my printer, so now I'm going to have to see what it looks like as a print.