Struggled a bit yesterday

You've heard me mention Anna and her amazing macros before. She is so immensely talented, and has vision I only hope to have some day.

She posted some leaf images a couple of weeks ago, and I totally fell in love with one of them. So much so, she agreed to allow me to purchase a print to display in my home. Her image can be found here:
http://www.betterphoto.com/gallery/big.asp?photoID=3586584&catID=&style=&rowNumber=140&memberID=119685
If you click on "gallery" at the upper right, you can also see some more of her beautiful work.

Anyhow, I decided I was going to give this a shot (no pun intended). NOT as easy as she makes it look, that's for sure, and I still like her image best. I don't think I had strong enough backlighting to bring out the detail in the leaf and stem, and the interior of the room was fairly dark, so I ended up battling noise issues in a big way. I think the green also causes some noise, as I usually don't have this difficult of a time at 400 ISO. I'll likely try this again later in the day when the light streaming in this window is stronger.

My colors are kind of all over the place, I was playing with processing a little bit....