We decided to go with a recycled “Christmas tree” this year. My wife used the cutting from the garden, the legs are from a silver birch, the rings are woven from cuttings from the bushes.
The photos on the wall behind are photos I made when we first moved in to the house, my wife re-did the whole garden and I photographed the changes in the garden over the year and printed a photo-book of the garden and 5 prints of close-ups of flowers in the garden.
It does look awesome, it’s a brilliant photograph. But I know what PHolder means because I find it very stressful to look at any photograph where part of it is out of focus, although I can’t explain why. Up until now I thought I was alone in this odd reaction. Bokeh makes me want to look away. Unsurprisingly, my favourite photographs are Victorian time-exposures with enormous depth of field. Must be something about the way my brain is wired…
I don’t think you need infinite depth of field, so your bird on the ground is very nice to me. As for the one in the trees I see both sides of the argument. If the background weren’t there it would make me uneasy, but if there is too much background it can be a bit distracting.
If it were me, I would crop more of the foreground tree out. There are two ways to do that. One is keeping the bird centred which would lead to more of the background trees also being cropped out, and making the bird larger and more of the focus. The other would be to put the bird on the 1/3 line of the picture and not intentionally centring it.
But in any case, the detail is amazing and the birds are beautiful and your photography skills are in evidence… so good job! The rest is just taste (and maybe some after shoot processing.)
Yes, I like this version much better, and the extra stuff in the back now stands out less and the slight blur gives it a very nice sense of depth. And yes I agree the clarity is outstanding.