Again, your opinion and comments please.

[Marko]

Did a quick search around and it seems my memory serves me ok here. Lenses do vary in what aperture is sharpest but factors such as diffraction (to do with the light wavelengths) causes sharpness to fall away at higher apertures. Chromatic Aberration can play it's part as well.
Some lenses are actually sharpest at f-stops around f4 or f5.6 but a general rule of thumb is apertures around 2 or 3 stops down from the minimum aperture of the lens is usually best.
So working in full stops, and generally speaking only, using f8 - f11 (some lenses may allow slightly lower or higher) is likely to produce the sharpest results.

Maybe someone here knows much more about it than I (I've only looked into it briefly here and there over the years) and correct me or add to what I've said?

Although I learned the same thing, there are 2 things going on and we don't want to confuse people. There's lens sharpness and depth of field that come into play when switching apertures. Lens sharpness refers to how 'crisp' the image looks and was likely much more important before the unsharp mask filter in the days of film. Even before digital, a print from a lens set to F8 versus a lens set to F22 the differences in crispness would be negligable to the naked eye unless we are talking huge prints and are actively looking for a difference.

What you would easily notice is the foreground to background sharpness (depth of field/depth of focus) difference between APERTURES and therefore aperture choice with regard to depth of field is far more important IMO especially with shots like this and other macro shots. Kat's method therefore is more correct as a general rule. We normally choose our apertures based on our desired foreground to background sharpness, not lens crispness. There will always be exceptions to the rule but that's my take on it. I too would have shot this shot at F-32 not F8 or F-11 if I wanted the most foreground to background sharpness.

One last thing unsharp masking is actually a film technique but Ed is right, you never really noticed oversharpening like we do in digital.
Hope that helps - Marko

BTW - 2nd shot is much better than the first, huge improvement

[kat]

Alright. I think that makes sense to me. I think I was mixing the two in a way.

[ridicwilco]

yeah i find your image a bit muddy in the center and that new image down below def fixed it for me