Ah hello again and aww shucks, tis an honor m'am. Now then, what you've got in focus (stamen/pistil?) is definitely accomplishing what we go for in these in/out of focus shallow dof shots, but its just soooo tiny, not much for the eye to grab onto. Problem is with shallow dof the amount of the subject that is in focus is directly related to how much of it's parallel to the film itself (which is why you see ppl shooting butterflies and such trying to get the camera/film plane as completely parallel to the flat of the wings as possible, otherwise the slightest tilt can throw something you might want in focus, out of focus.) Thus, the only way to get more of that black thingy in focus without using a smaller aperture (f5.6, f8, f11, etc - which we dont wanna do cuz we want that cool out of focus blurr you've got here) is to position the camera so that more of it is parallel to the film, which would obviously cause you to have to recompose the shot, a hard decision to make since the way the (BG = background) plays out here is so nice. I'm thinking that since the bottom seems to be the only area that could afford to be sacrificed some you could use that to your advantage by moving the camera lower and aiming the lens up a little (now, more of the black thing is in parallel to the film) and you get to keep most of the cool BG composition. Hope this made sense, good luck.
Good work sarah, the only thing that could make this better is if the in focus (x) were a little more defined, possibly by recomposing the shot so more of that were aligned with the film plane (pretty hard i know, it would completely change the image, which is great as is, but~)
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