I totatly agree with you on this. The flower was too small and that's the maximum blur I was able to get at the maximum aperture with the 100/2.8. Actually I tried gaussian blur here to blur the details further exactly like you mentioned, it didn't quite turn out well. Thanks for your constructive criticisim.
Beautiful abstract! Obviously you wanted the very closest part of the petals sharp and everything else more or less out of focus. I can't help but wonder what it would have looked like with the tips of the next petals sharp instead. When I think about it, maybe that would just look like a mistake, whereas the way you chose to do it - it is obviously intentional. For some reason this works better when the image is smaller. On the large image it's a bit straining on my eyes as they keep trying to focus! Maybe there is too much detail in the unsharp parts of the image - maybe those parts should be even more blurry??? --Olaf
