E4 composition, lighting and camera settings

I've decided I'm going to just have the one plant pot. I think with 3 plants growing, it would just be too overcrowded. I want it to be busy, but not so busy that you don't know what to look at.

I thought I'd see how I'd want the composition to be, and what lighting and stuff I'd need. 

3.5 aperture - 1.6 shutter speed - 200 ISO 

This image was taken with no extra light, just the light in my room, giving me a dark, yellowy image, which I don't want because it's not clean and sharp. The shutter speed is dangerously low (still the risk of something being knocked), so I need to add extra light to bump that up a bit. 

3.5 aperture - 25 shutter speed - ISO 200

I added in the extra light, and I now have a brighter, whiter, sharper image.

Auto focus isn't always reliable. So shoot in manual. 

Now for composition.  This i felt was too close, the plant could easily go off screen

This feels like there is too much foreground space. So I think the middle image will work best. 










I still need to decide how i'm going to do the background, I had in my head, the plant was on a windowsill, so the background would be a window with and outside view. And I was going to say get rid of the reflective surface, but i quite like it actually.