Pink Zinnia + redo

Barbara, I am not sure I understand your question but by stopping down (and lowering your ss), you could have achieved more dof on the flower, which actually looks fine as is as far the the focus goes, but your issue here, IMO, is with the harsh light and the busy bg, which would have been even busier with a smaller fstop. If your question is how you could have gotten the flower, and just the flower, in focus while avoiding bg distractions, you then probably needed to do a focus stack, unless changing your position could have isolated the flower from the bg.  Phil can best answer your stacking Qs. 

Thank you, Scott.  Here is a redo attempting to improve the appearance of the light and the background.

Big improvement IMO, Barbara.

Barbara: Much better on the repost for sure. I'm a single capture guy and don't stack so I practically wear out my DOF preview getting to where I want to be. A technique I use is to get the primary focus point as close to the camera as possible and still get the back of the subject acceptably sharp. On this particular subject I would put the primary focus point on the near petals and slowly increase the DOF until the center is sharp and then let the rear petals go a little soft. Another thing you can do in processing is to vignette and/or blur the BG to soften some of the unattractive BG elements. One other thing to consider is the use of a longer lens. You'll notice that probably 95% or more of my macro shots are taken with my 200mm macro. Its narrower field of view helps control the BG even more. Hope this helps. >=))>

Hi Barbara.  Your repost is very much improved.  I notice that you use Topaz denoise and detail.  Their Remask software makes selecting a flower and separating it from the bg very easy with a little practice.  That allows you to do anything you want to the bg without affecting the flower, which can allow you to use small apertures and get the dof up.  I'll often pull distracting bg stuff out of the way as well, so I have more clear space behind the subject.  If you want to try stacking sometime, PS6 has some basic capabilities and it's really not very hard to use if you are used to working with layers.

One thing to remember if you're trying to get the entire subject in focus is that about 1/3 of the focus range is in front of the focal plane and about 2/3 behind it, so I'll often try to pic a focal point about 1/3 of the way into the subject then use that dof preview with live view and zoom in on the nearest point to make sure it will look good.

Hope this helps,

The redo is better all around. Scott, Bill and Dennis have given you some good advice. One of the techniques I use on a BG on a separate layer is to use Average on the BG layer, then fade the average to about 50%.