This image was made in Hanalei Bay, Hawaii.
At first, I was quite taken with this image. I actually printed it. Sadly, it was recently relegated to the recycling bin.
We all have a natural tendency to fall in love with our images. To grow artistically/critically, we need to remember that sometimes love is blind. Infatuation can be very blind. It can block your artistic progress.
What opened my eyes?
First: although this image seems to have nice visual order, it lacks the key ingredient for visual order: simplicity. There are two subjects that compete for our attention: the yellow flowers and the two orange flowers.
Second: none of the colours are happy together. To check one by one: the complementary colour of green is red, the complementary colour of orange is blue and the complementary colour of yellow is violet. No colour harmony ingredient is present here. So the only Ingredient in this image is that it’s a bit unusual. ‘A bit’ is not enough in the absence of all other ingredients.