I was thinking over my work with my husband. I had come to the conclusion that there were three things that I always strived for in my images: simplicity, beauty and honesty. So we went through a couple of my images. He specifically asked me about this one though, how I felt it measured up to my three words. I love this image. It's beautiful and simple in it's composition, though not in execution (quite a few hours spent compositing in all the flowers). But I felt it lacked in honesty. And when my husband asked where, I replied the flowers.
Because of budget issues I used fake flowers. Three to be exact. Over and over again. I wished I had the budget to use real flowers. Because of the nature of using the same three flowers I knew there would be a look of fakes in the flowers. Not to mention the fact that fake flowers don't have the same natural color variations as the real deal. I thought I had fixed that in the original edit, and wile the image was received well I knew in my heart that I wasn't satisfied with it.
So I played with it again. And all I did was change the hues of the flowers, softened them, made them, what I felt was more honest. The color shift makes the image stronger I think, and cohesive. It adds to its simplicity and beauty. I'm happy with the redo.
I may, one day, completely reshoot this image, using real flowers. We'll see. But for now, it's great to be able to go into the file and make changes so that it's closer to what I strive to achieve: simplicity, beauty and honesty.