Flower Art

So I've been trying to get some good shots of these certain flowers and just cannot do it no matter what setting I use on my camera. Could be just bad time of day (not enough light, light too harsh).

But...
I love this cropped area of one picture.
I call it: "Meeting of the Leaves"



I also have been playing around with different artistic effects and liked the results on these cropped areas of the photos.




I used Smart Blur, Unsharp Mask, and Texture.
The artistic effect looks best at full scale, but I had to resize these above ones to fit my blog.

The idea of using Smart Blur and Unsharp Mask came from an online Photoshop tutorial.

I liked a little texture added to it so it looked more like it was painted on canvas or textured paper.

NOTE: That's how my current blog header was made. A different flower setting, though. Same place as the bees and butterfly pics I posted earlier.