Kevin Drum Not stupid at all because it's not f/1.0. I mostly use manual lenses these days, so the camera doesn't record the aperture in the EXIF data. On some websites where I post my pictures, it just displays "--" or something similar for the aperture, but tookapic seems to default to "f/1.0". I can manually edit the EXIF data during post-processing, but I never take the time to do it. Plus, I can't always remember the exact aperture I used.
As for this picture, I'm fairly certain it was f/2. I was farther away than you'd think because this is a very small crop from the original image. A lot of out-of-focus stuff was simply cropped out. If I were to shoot this again, I'd add an extension tube or use a macro lens so I could actually get closer.
Here are the relevant settings from Lightroom for this pic: imgur.com/dsG25bc . I almost always drastically bring down the highlights and raise the shadows, and for b&w, I raise the lower left point in Curves to give it that trendy softness. Honestly, I think your images look great already.
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