I like the colours on the leaf in focus together with your chosen background very much and am quite fond of the dof and the light overall. I do agree that the leaf on the left is a bit bright and distracting... do you feel you urgently want to observe custom photo sizes and therefore cannot just crop it off?
Yup, one of the leaf problems is overexposure and DOF. This is one of those shots that nees to be rethought a bit. You have, however, gotten out there and made a great effort to begin work on this problem.
thanks for your comments... and LaFoto, I liked how the leaf looked off centre, which is why I decided not to crop. Since I've been on this forum, I really like the look of images that aren't so "static" as JonK pointed out from my first post here... so I was keeping that in mind with this one.