Thank you gentlemen, I am taking more and more to using HDR when bright lighting is pushing the lighting range, Lightroom makes it so easy and the results seem to be pretty natural, I was put off by the garish results from earlier HDR methods but now it seem much better.
I realise that the flowers, several of which are well past their best aren't particularly pretty but it was an attempt, an experiment if you like, to emphasise the flowers and separate them from their background. In my eyes I failed to make a decent picture. Looking at it afresh, I should probably have waited until I had the tripod and a micro Nikkor lens, then concentrated on a much smaller part of the branch. I really wanted to capture the characteristic of that plant of it's pendent flowers in rows. The odd dead flower or bud is fine, that's life, warts and all!
In future I will try various apertures, I enjoy the 50 1.4 but it has to be used carefully, I was expecting too much here, I can see that now.
Perhaps a more distant shot to show the habit, then a close up of a small bunch of flowers to show the detail and beauty of the individual blooms.
Once again thank you for helping me understand the image better and consider alternative ways of approaching it.
