Hi Debbie,

Thanks for sharing! Butterflies make for great macro subject matter, but can be a real challenge without dedicated macro gear.

Looking first at your image and then seeing the EXIF data posted by George, it's pretty clear what's "wrong" with your image. Your camera's "sharpness" setting was set to "soft" and your f-stop set way too shallow at f5.6 - simply a function of the "auto" setting of your camera (on my screen the face of the butterfly is actually rather 'soft', seemingly a bit out of focus). Macro work absolutely requires "critical focus" and sharpness. Depth of field is more a function of your creativity - some images may employ a rather shallow depth of field to "highlight" a certain portion of the images, while others may call for much greater depth of field. I would thus shoot either in aperature priority mode or in manual for macro work. Your camera may even have a dedicated "macro mode".

Your overall composition is pretty good, especially since you did not crop the picture so tight as to not leave any room for post-processing/editing in PS.

Regards,

Holger