Soft/Hard Focus

I would be very tempted to use manual focus John, which means that the lens will focus on what you want, rather than what the camera selects. With a little practice you will be able to do this very quickly, like we all once had to before auto focus. My old eyes are glad that auto focus is now so good....most of the time. 

You might also wish to selectively use the focus points which hopefully can be shifted to suit. 

  I have had this issue in the past, when taking shots where I think this will happen I stick to the Canon, the bridge cameras are great for a lot of situations but manual focus I prefer the dslr. One move you may be able to do is if possible select a centre focus only in the menu so that the focus is concentrated on the centre point of the viewfinder and can ignore the twigs and grass that gets in the shot. Agree withDave about the monopod- have used one myself my get in the habit of using it more.

   John, had a fox in the garden at the back of the shop this evening, trouble is at the time I was on the phone giving the weeks figures ( boss has to know Saturday night- can't wait till Monday ). As I was saying mr. fox in garden jumped over wall into car park, got a one handed shot having grabbed camera while talking on the phone but he was facing the other way. Then a car appeared so he turned round and ran back and over the wall which has a big drop down the other side to the car park so he had quite a jump and for a split second he scrambled over the top of the wall and we were eye to eye at about 4 or 5 foot away and then he was away along the top of the wall. I failed miserably and missed that magic moment even with the camera in my hand !!

Sometimes, you may need  to increase the ISO number to allow a smaller aperture setting. As always, it is a compromise between noise and required depth of field. Occasionally, it is possible to get a good sharp shot with a wide aperture and low ISO, as in Vince Hawthorn's recent excellent shot of a Dragonfly. In this case, the subject was all in one plane parallel to the sensor, and depth of field was not so critical. (BTW, if you are reading this Vince, maybe you can tell us whether you used flash?).

Picture by Vince Hawthorn

Thank you, Vince, for clarifying whether the flash was on or off for the dragonfly shot. I can see now that you had good direct sunlight on your subject (in fact I should have looked more closely at the shadows of the insect's legs and guessed it was direct sunlight).

As you modestly say, it was 90% luck, but my photography is like that too!  And the dark background in your shot is very effective, which also made me think that you might have used flash.