My 75mm lens never even made it into my bag for Connemara, even though last year it had been one of my most used lenses. I wanted to take my 90mm and I didn’t think I had room for both. It was OK. And although my 90mm is what I typically use for flower photos, now I wanted to have a go with the 75. Things were going OK until I realized it didn’t focus all that close, which meant the idea of two flowers with the front one more in focus than the back one wasn’t possible (from the distance that made the composition); so I thought I’d just try it the other way round. Oh well. MY friend Paul provided this excellent commentary

Thanks for attaching the picture you spoke about. I copied it into my photo editor for a better look and studied it for quite a while. I think conceptually it is a fine picture. In this example though, the foreground flower in spite of being out of focus still commands the lion’s share of attention. There are several reasons for this. The two most obvious are the brightness and size of the left hand flower. Dominate position being the third. Arnheim speaks about this in his big blue book. Another attribute that caught my attention are the various green leaves just behind the left hand flower that are in sharp focus. All of this in toto makes it impossible for the far flower to compete.
So one or another these relationships need to be reversed so that the “subject” is never competing for attention but rather is supported by the other elements within the frame. For example in this picture, a longer lens would compress the scene and render the far flower larger.

No need to say anything more than that. The next photo I took after my experiment, still with the 75mm, was this one of a daylily nearby, and hopefully it works a lot better.