Warmthby
equanimityComment by Paul: Greetings from the Critique Club:
Well done for entering your first image in a DPC challenge. I like idea of this image, your notes explain your intention well. The idea is a third of the job with the other two thirds being execution and presentation.
Execution: Focus-wise, this image struggles - I'm not sure what's caused this lack of focus but you've missed it by quite some margin. Working with an aperture of f/5.6 doesn't give you a huge depth of field at short object to camera distances so the tolerance for missing the focus is small.
I'm not sure why you are set to 1600ISO, although I can't see any evidence of noise, with a shutter speed of 1/2500, you have plenty of margin there to bring both down.
Compositionally, the basics are there but as you commenters have said either include all of the flower or go closer; here it just looks like a petal has been carelessly clipped. I suspect that you might have been inside your lens's minimum focussing distance so pulling back a bit would help with composition and focus.
Exposure wise it's tricky high contrast lighting and although it isn't optimal on the screen, I don't think you're so far away that you couldn't pull it back in software.
Presentation: (Post processing): Not sure what tools you have access to here but doing some highlight recovery and adding some tonal contrast to the petals would help the overall quality of the image. Having said that, with an image this unsharp this alone wouldn't make much difference - you need to raw material first.
Good luck with your next entry.
Paul
