You’re flying through the assignments!
On your first concern you may have been just on the edge of your “Minimum Focus Distance”.
Every lens has a limit for how close something can be to the lens and still be in focus. Most lenses have the minimum focus distance written on the barrel of lens in meters or CM.
I have a zoom lens that has a minimum focus distance of 1.2 Meters. That means the lens will not be able to shoot a photo that is in focus if the subject matter is closer to the camera than the 1.2 meters. Anything beyond 1.2 meters is fair game.
In your case the strawberry that is closest of the camera (bottom left) is just past your mimum focus distance whereas the rest are still in focus.
Another possibility here is that your depth of field is quite narrow give you’ve shot this at f4.5
If you had shot at a higher fstop your depth of field would have increased and more of the strawberries would be in focus.
I hope that makes sense.
The main thing here is that you have you not only completed the goals of the assignment (to simplify using color) but it’s also a nice image!!!
Way to go Kaeli!
Nice work!