Precious Little Treasure

Ah!! I love this image! It's a beautiful and bright contrast of sky blue and gliterring gold, offset by the soft feather tips and shimmering bokeh.

I think the square crop and central placement of the drop works well to bring the viewer right in to the main subject of the photo. I also adore the way the bokeh has collected more to the left than the right, as if it were leaving a trail of magic behind the drop.

For improvement, my biggest suggestion here would be to consider a way of working on the noise. In case you are not sure of what I mean by "noise" in the picture, it's the fuzzy, spotty texture of sorts that appears across the photo. Usually photography of this nature aims above all to be as clear and smooth as possible, although this is largely dependant on your camera, camera settings and lighting setup.

I myself haven't enough experience to explain the ideal camera settings to you, but I can say that a good macro lens, or at least macro filter set, is essential in helping to get these close up shots. I also am unexperienced in general lighting, except to say that in my experience, the more light the better your camera will handle the shot.

However, I am experienced in editing techniques within programs like photoshop and this would provide you with a couple of strategies for improving on already present noise;

- The "remove noise" filter in the filters menu can help you to cut out some of the noise, and if used sparingly makes a good start to the process of lessening it's impact (be careful not to lose too much detail though)

- With large amounts of noise like we see here, I would consider using the "gaussian blur" or "surface blur" filters in the filters menu. Apply at a high strength (so the picture is no longer recognisable and on a duplicated layer) and then adjust the opacity of this blurred layer to between 30-50% for soft DOF areas. You may also need to mask out the parts of that layer that would end up blurring the glitter on the drop.

- Regain some details if lost with the "high pass" filter option as I mentioned in my last critique

- Try and work with the image in the size you took it in, or smaller, since enlarging an image that began at somethin like 700px or less will lessen quality and make clarity much harder to achieve. I tend to start with photos at least 1000px on the shortest side, if not around the 2000/3000px mark. Camera settings will need to adjusted with most cameras to let it know how large you want the photo to be when taken.

Hopefully some of these tips will be useful for you, I'm loving this picture and the wonderfully magical feeling it has!