Telkwa-Houston BC

[sdyk]

The first 3 pictures are in the park at Houston, BC, and the forth picture is Hudson Bay Mountain looking from the river in Smithers, BC

This first one is the fountain behind some flowers. I really like this shot.
DSCF0736 by stephen_dykstra4005, on Flickr

This one's also in the park in Houston, but unfortunately I can't identify flowers.
DSCF0697 by stephen_dykstra4005, on Flickr

This one's also in Houston. It's a great shot because of the rock that's behind these flowers.
DSCF0687 by stephen_dykstra4005, on Flickr

There's a place called "Riverside RV and Capground" in town whith a small walking trail. Although, while on that walking trail there's several other trails that branch off, and 2 of them go down to the river. That's where this is taken.
P7230286 by stephen_dykstra4005, on Flickr

[QuietOne]

I'm not a gardener, but I think the orange flowers arre crysanthemums. Someone will chime in if I'm wrong. They're a nice spot of color, as are the yellow flowers in the next picture (no idea what those are)

[theantiquetiger]

sdyk, you say you don't mind critiques, so I would like to give you my two cents...

(these are just my opinion)

#1 - Cool sculpture! The composition of this image does not work for me. You have too much dead space in front of the flowers and the sculpture is not located in a good spot. I would have panned up and to the right. This would do a few things, rid the dead space, place the sculpture on the cross hairs of the rule of thirds, gain more sky, and would have made the white flowers not divide the image in half. I would have placed the bottom left white flower in the bottom left corner. You have nice exposure on the image, but you need a little more contrast to make the sculpture and flowers pop.

#2 - Great focus on the flowers but they are placed terribly in frame. They are way too close to the bottom of the image. Great color and contrast!!!

#3 - This one just needs a little tweaking. I would have panned just a tad to the right, causing the left flower to be closer the the edge and the right flower to be fully in frame, trying to make the flowers uniform across the frame. I also would have panned down just a hair and maybe gotten a little lower for a better angle. This looks like you are just standing over them, shooting down. I am not sure if it is the flowers or if the image is a little soft (out of focus). I cannot find a sharp spot in the frame.

#4 - Great landscape! One thing you need to keep in mind when shooting/processing; The human eye is naturally attracted to light. If the mountain is what you were trying to showcase (which I feel that is what you were doing), it needs to correctly exposed. My eyes want to look at the clouds and brightly exposed green leaves in the foreground. When shooting something like this, put you camera in spot metering or center weighted (I didn't look at your Exif file) and meter on the mountain. It looks like you shot this in evaluated metering, where it looks at the entire frame and sets the exposure. With bright foreground, bright sky and white clouds, it caused you mountain to be under exposed in order for the rest of the image to be correctly exposed. I would have panned up on this shot. The foreground is hurting the image more than helping it.

Like I said, this is just my opinion, take it for what's it worth.