Your work has improved beyond measure Lee - obviously post processed but done very well. The focus stacking shot and flowers moving in the wind are excellent. All very enjoyable though.
Cheers Tewdric
The flowers moving in the wind goes against my natural urge to have everything pin-sharp, so it's a case of forcing myself to set a shutter speed below 1/15th and see what happens.
I'm time-constrained (by cycling, so I don't mind) so I don't have time to really play.
Every time I get a couple of hours to devote to playing with a new technique (Focus Stacking and exposure bracketing for example) I get some really rewarding results.
Once I get PBP done I'll spend more time experimenting.
As for post-production, yes, everything is tweaked. I'm not sure I ever posted a photo without tweaking something.
Since I got the Canon DLSR I use a Canon Raw editor to squeeze a photo from whatever I took. I don't see that as cheating though, I see it as making it look like it felt at the time.
No camera can capture what you (think you) saw and mostly it still isn't as good as being there.
RAW absolutely rules though. It took me a while to realise the potential but I regret not using it by default when I first got the Canon. I have some favourite images that I could have "squeezed" a whole lot more out of.