Staying Balanced

Always a good idea if you can pull it off!

My apologies for the repetitive subject matter this month. I usually try to make the blog topics more varied in content, just because I think it's probably more interesting to the viewer.  But I'm awfully busy this month, and really am curious to do a more in depth study of some photos.  Today's photo...balance.  I definitely like the compositional balance here, but the depth of focus is really a frustration, so I'm going to focus on that (technical info to follow...) One thing I've learned doing this blog is that if I use my 80-200 lens and I zoom to 200, then I can pull the depth of field to almost nothing.  I've used this to my advantage for the most part, but sometimes it's really a double-edged sword.  Here is a perfect example.  The leaf on the left is annoyingly out of focus.  From the image, it looks like it's closer to the lens, although I'm not exactly sure what the difference in distance is between that left balancing leaf and the three on the right (where I focused the lens).   I'm at 105mm focal length, which is about half of what this lens can do.  The distance between leaves can't be more than a foot and is likely about six inches; this just isn't that big of a tree. I'm at f/9 which should be a pretty good depth of field, and my estimate for the leaf distance is probably five feet.  How can the depth of field possible drop off that much when I'm only zooming to 105mm?  Why can't I pull all the leaves into focus?  I don't really want to slow the shutter speed down because it's such an awkward camera angle.  Technical help welcome!