Reworked…
Anything and everything
Is this a composite: No
Nikon D3400
300mm
1/1000
f/8
ISO 800
Cropped vertically, convert to black and white and adjusted blacks, whites and contrast to make BG darker.
This is very attractive! The whites are a bit blown but the darker pepper-like flakes in the bloom give it the sort of detail that is called “tooth” and the grain is evocative of B/W film. I like the bit of detail in the BG. Would be nice if the secondary stem were closer to the first but that is always so much easier said than done.
Yeah, I see what you mean about the whites @Diane_Miller . I have a hard time with them, and when I tried adjusting in pp it takes away those little black seeds or whatever they are on the top…
I’m not sure what adjustments you were making, but you should be able to work on the whites without losing the little black dots, which are important to the image.
You might try setting the camera to bracket 3 or even 5 exposures, at 1 stop apart, and choose later which one you like best. Hand holding you couldn’t do an HDR bracket, but it would be a good learning opportunity.
So you just mean take several photos of the same subject, but at different settings. That would be good to do, I always take several photos but mainly to make sure I come out with the perfect positioning and sharpness. But yeah I like that trying different settings for the same scene, which I usually am doing, but not necessarily comparing in that particular way. Thanks! Oh, and I was just talking about trying to adjust the whites in the flower in Lightroom but it just wasn’t working well.
You can set the camera to auto-bracket exposure – check the manual. Then do that for each composition you experiment with, just to be able to pick out the best exposure to work with later.
If the whites were blown out in your original exposure (check the histogram) you won’t be able to do anything with them except turn them some shade of gray.
Hi @Diane_Miller so I checked and my camera doesn’t have an auto exposure bracketing feature. So it’s something I guess I can just do manually, which I kind of do already anyway! As I’ve said before I have pretty basic equipment! 
Vanessa, this is a fine look at this Queen Anne’s Lace. What you need to better handle the whites (or the blacks) is to burn and dodge using Luminosity masks. Some web searching should tell you how to create those in your post processing software.
This is a nice find! Agree with Diane regarding the second stem.
Thank you all @Diane_Miller @Ola_Jovall @Mark_Seaver for your inputs. So I went back in to this photo and started from scratch, I did a little different adjustments, and got rid of the bottom flower bud, does it seem any better?….
Good that you posted the rework next to the original so we can click between the two in enlarged view. The whites are less blown out – subtly so but I think it makes the flower much better. But the blacks still have problems. The BG is brighter but there are still a lot of blocked up blacks. If you can get a smoother transition it would be more pleasing. Use the histogram to judge, not the iPad screen, which may not be that accurate. Here is the histogram for the second image – note how the blacks are pushed up abruptly against the left wall. They are separated a little but the darkest tones are still slammed. Don’t rely on auto adjustments – they will do things like that.
I don’t know the limitations of your iPad and PS setup, but I think a lot of your images present a very interesting viewpoint and it is well worth learning the best processing you can manage.
These images don’t have an embedded profile. When you convert to JPEG you should be sure to do 2 things: Convert to sRGB and then embed the profile. There should be a checkbox for embedding the profile.
Hi @Diane_Miller the info should all be in there, I have it on sRGB and I have to include metadata and camera and raw info? Oh and I just work with Lightroom Mobile…I am learning more things that I can do with it though. I also if I have to do any small repair I put it in my other tool which is Pixelmator because I do awful with the clone tool in Lightroom! 
