Dirt, actually I think you have done a pretty good at setting up this shot, using out of focus foreground (and background) effects to paint a canvas for your flower, so you should give yourself some credit for that. The image you created isn't how it simply looks to the eye, rather it looks like something we can dream of and imaging in our minds, or more precisely what you
wanted to create. Controlling this in more detail would be a step further on the road you already have taken, but it would certainly not be your first step!
I understand what you say, Asa. Really I do, however a garden is a product of love and work. We remove spent blooms, plants new plants and so on. Why would we then suddenly put restriction on doing the same to be able to take a better photograph? The other problem is that we don't remember things in the same way as a photograph does, because
a photograph remembers everything present, every weed, every little detail, but our minds tend to be much more selective about these things, simplifying things as we go, remembering the flower and not the weed growing next to it. In this sense a painting can be a better representation of how we see and remember things than most photographs are.
Now if we wandered away into the wilderness photographing, things would be a little different, as we then would have a natural history aspect to consider, but imagine the following situation: You find a wonderful patch of a rare orchids and as you put down your tripod you suddenly discover a candy paper stuck in the inflorescence. While this would be an excellent opportunity to take a photo to illustrate how we destroy the environment with garbage, it would perhaps not give the image we imagined. It would no longer be a picture of an orchid, it's would more or less be a picture of a candy paper. Should we remove the paper or not? What if the paper wasn't a paper, but a leaf? The answer is perhaps that we actually can take as many versions of a subject like we want, with or without candy paper or leaves. Those images can all have their uses
