Ahh-tishoo! Must stock up on antihistamines .... thanks for the seasonal reminder!
I assume that I can't have all the daffs. in focus.I placed the red focusing squares on where I wanted sharpness-in the foreground, the middle or the back,I tried many aperture settings including f22 which you'd think would have everything sharp front to back. Any thoughts. ??
Difficult. The way I do this sort of thing is to calculate the hyperfocal distance & set that on the distance scale (lens set to manual focus). Then everything between half the hyperfocal distance and infinity is tolerably sharp. The hyperfocal distance does decrease with a larger f ratio (more depth of field) but you may not be able to get sufficient to cover the whole scene ... with digital methods you could expose two images, one for the more distant areas & one for the nearer ones, and merge them, but it would be necessary to take care if the effect is not to look artificial. You could also try shooting "short" so that the more distant flowers are slightly out of focus & applying severe sharpening (unsharp mask) selectively to those areas ... which will give an impression of detail even though it's not resolved.
But the trick that works best is to stand further back and underfill the frame - so that you have to crop the image to get the composition you want - or alternatively use a shorter focal length lens from the same viewpoint; either of these will increase the depth of field & does not necessitate complex "fiddling" in the darkroom.
As for finished file size - the more detail is in the image, the bigger the file will be. I don't use Lightroom, just the JPEG quality slider in Irfanview (which is what I use for final cropping, resizing & conversion to JPEG) ... everything else is done in RAW, TIFF or FITS, full size & uncompressed.
