this is a lovely job. the lighting looks fantastic. I hope you dont mind if i give you a quick critique. The composition and subject are lovely and well handled as is the lighting. but when i look closely i see imperfections on the backgound and the surface it is setting on. On shots like this it behooves you to either clean all that up before you shoot or handle it in photoshop. you could try increasing the distance between the subject and background or lowering the f-stop value (provide that doesnt harm the focus on your subect)

oh and one last thing the light infront of the plant seems to the right instead of being centered. something you probably fix in photoshop but it seems to take away from the images sense of balance

Hey there! Thanks for the feedback. I certainly don't mind a critique. I just dismiss the stuff I don't agree with! ;)

You can see detail in the background because I was shooting at around F22... normally I shoot at really wide apertures, I was just mixing it up a bit here and playing at the other extreme. I like to really push settings and see if I can still make it work. This certainly isn't meant to be any great effort, just the results of some frittering around with lighting. As such, I didn't really care what the orchid's sitting on... though I did make sure all the pug hair was off of it. That variation in the texture isn't coming out of that fabric, and I didn't really feel like cleaning it up in post. I do that sort of thing enough already! I'd try a bit harder if I planned on selling it... and I can always go fix it up later. :)

Now the one comment that's really pertinent, the placement of the kicker... It's slightly to the left of the orchid to play with the petals better. I have many variations where the light is dead nuts centered above the flower... the petals are a mess. If I were feeling frisky I'd have dropped a second light over the plant to nuke both the unwanted shadows centering causes and balance out the light beneath it... but I'm much too fixated on symmetry and balance as it is, so it's nice to leave my work a little off kilter sometimes. I'm way too formal as it is. :)

Thanks again!

Also, note that I weighted the light on the background slightly to the left to compensate for the slightly to the right hot spot on the fabric. So while it's off kilter in specific, I think it still balances out on the whole. ;)

Dang. Lighting's pretty on this one.