Along with using an open aperture to get the shallow DoF, I intentionally de-focused the flowers in the background and then moved the foreground flower in front of the lens until it was in focus. I think I got more of a background blur than I could have using the open aperture itself as the lens is not that fast and this was not using macro either. Something I'd seen in a video and wanted to try. I held the flower with a tweezer so my hand won't be in the shot and had to have a pretty fast shutter speed to avoid the movement of the handheld flower. Trickier to do than I'd first thought! But the effect worked as I'd hoped.
