Frustrated Photographer

I suppose that there is a time when all photographers become frustrated with their work or their skill; however, you would like to put it. Recently I have had a strong sense to photograph a landscape image that can be printed and framed as a beautiful piece of art. A fine art piece created from one of my photographs. Yes, I have many photographs that are framed, even printed on canvas, but I want a fine art piece. So to make a long story short, I have been trying my hand at landscape photography. My neighbor has a flower bed that has beautiful tulips and daffodils blooming and I thought the flowers would be a wonderful subject to create my art piece from. Late yesterday my husband I decided to take Grand Dog for a walk and I carried my camera with me. As we got closer to my neighbor's yard, I could see the tulips and I begin to vision in my mind the art piece that I would create from the digital images that I would take. I had my favorite lens that I consider to be my "workhorse lens", Nikon 18-200 (telephoto lens) 3.5 -5.0. I checked the settings on my camera and changed them to meet the time of day that I was shooting. As I begin to shoot, I quickly came to the realization that I was not doing something right. The depth of field was wrong, I had some tulips in focus, some were out of focus. The more I tried to correct what I was doing, the worse I got. Here I was down on my stomach, crawling on my knees, sitting on the cold ground and it seemed the more I tried the more I failed at trying to photograph these beautiful flowers. Finally, I was able to get what I thought were at least 10 good images. That is until I got home and downloaded the images. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as I reviewed the images. As you can see from the photo below, the out of focus stem and the fuzzy tulips. As I viewed the images I was thinking to myself,"what were you doing?!" I have managed to salvage the same image by retouching the image in Photoshop, but I have not found my art piece that I had visioned. I hope that the tulips will last until Saturday when hopefully I can try again. However, I do plan to use my "normal" lens which is a Nikon 50 mm, 1.4 lens. The vision may have become fuzzy, but it is not dead. Yet.