Very deep, rich and natural colours. Nice. :o)

Just going to jump in here on the caveats, with both feet running ... hope you don't mind.

As much as I enjoy the simplicity of your composition, insofar as not being cluttered ... might have been tempted to crop and present to us your photo here in a portrait format.

The left and right hand side elements don't add as much to the overall composition in my humble opinion. And taking into consideration the DOF and stronger area of resolution of the focal area of the berries/leaves ... think you could bring your viewer's eyes to the visual prize even more so with a tighter crop.

The colour palette is indeed very complimentary and on that note, I find your image to be soothing and serene.

Perhaps, try reworking this one yourself? As a suggestion?

As to the kind of berries you captured, can't speak to your query ... although, they do look like blackberries. Here is some additional information regarding identifying them:

"The next time you walk through a woody area or park, take a look around and see if you can spot the woody, thorned vines and generally white, rose-like flowers characteristic of blackberry plants."

You do get around, don't you. A tad envious of your travels, as this area positively looks gorgeous from this shared microcosm of that setting.

You are right, maybe I should have cropped it differently to show off that one berry as the rest are out of focus. I don't know why the noise - maybe from increasing the colour saturation? That part I did photoshop a little.

Gorgeous textures!

*counts on his fingers ... 1,2,3 ... 16 days*

Not too long to wait for a response I hope, Shannon?

:oP

Just kidding a bit in the above.

Re: Noise resulting from increasing colour saturation.

Here you go, a technique to correct for that:

http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/LLRGB.html


My best guess would be that it was present beforehand. And was made somewhat more noticeable by the site's generation of other resolutions and the jpegging (or ... *shudder* ... the re-jpegging if you upload your image files in .jpg format) of your original.


Suggestion to correct for, or provide an assist in retaining image quality:

Save your edited image in .png format, once you have completed your post processing in Photoshop. And resize if necessary if the total file size results in you being 'timed out' when attempting to upload.

"Timed out" ... or, the dreaded 'white screen of nothing', as it has become known in some circles when uploading/posting.

As it stands now, 10 megabytes seems to be the magic number before encountering being timed out by the servers. Highly dependent on your type of internet connection for the most part.

There is, in fact, no 'total' file size restriction.