Caterpillar macro

Shallow depth of field in a macro photograph usually means using a large lens aperture for increased bokeh, but that compromises focus on the subject. It seems to me the whole point of photographing something small is to show its intriguing detail. The best scenario is when the subject is completely sharp and the background is attractively out of focus. That's what I did with this hornworm caterpillar I found on one of my tomato plants at home. I photographed the insect with a ring flash which enabled me to use f/32 for complete depth of field on the alien-like creature. But that made the messy background come into focus too much. It was distracting. So, I replaced the original background with a natural and attractive blurred foliage background. I did this by opening two photos simultaneously on my desktop and cloning from the foliage picture to the image of the caterpillar. My settings for the original image were 1/100, 320 ISO, and I used a 50mm macro lens.