A photo challenge from Lost in Translation: Once Over

I like this photo challenge as I quite often am not satisfied with a photo I have taken and want to try and capture the feeling or mood when I was attempting to get what I wanted.

Here is the original – the closest of many photos to what I hoped to achieve.

What I wanted but just couldn’t adjust my camera to the right settings to achieve was a dark background in order to fringe highlight the small hairs on the begonia leaves and stems. Once I had manipulated the image to what I desired, I then removed some of the elements that I didn’t want in the photo with cropping and cloning.
This is my final result.