Greetings and congrats on entering! I looked at your profile and see that you are still relatively new to dpc, so welcome, and I hope it meets your every expectation. Also, I saw that your name was Carma. Way cool. I spell mine (name) Karma. I've met several Carmens, but I don't think I've ever "met" another C/Karma. :)
oK, on to your picture.
My first impression was that this was a straight on, slightly underexposed shot of a pretty white flower.Typically, those do not fare so well in challenges, unless you do something really dramatic with the lighting, composition, context or all three.
First, I'm going to take a stab at what you might have been able to do with this particular shot to give it a bit more punch, but I'm fairly weak myself at post processing, so take it for what it is worth, then, I'm going to make some suggestions about what you can do if you ever want to reshoot this, or something similar to it.
When you adjusted the brightness up 2 notches, that caused the foremost and most obvious, petal to become blown out. Also, when you adjusted the contrast, it probably made it more so. Rather than doing a brightness/contrast adjustment, it may have helped to see if your software had "levels" (PaintShop Pro, and Photoshop both do) and using that to make your adjustments. Or, use curves to bring the midtones up (the middle of the "curve) and possibly the dark end (the bottom of the curve) without blowing the hightlights.
Compositionally, if you had room, setting this on an angle is a personal favorite trick I like to use. It gives a bit of "movement" through the frame and makes it a little more interesting than just straight horizontal or vertical. If you didn't have room to rotate it, maybe crop further in so that the center of the flowers looked like eyes or something.
If you want to reshoot, I would set my aperture to a bigger number, if possible, to allow a greater depth of field. This will help the focus issue by allowing more of the flower to be in focus, and not just a couple of edges. Or, I would slow the shutter speed down a bit to allow more light, and thus fix the exposure thing.
Something that might be neat would be to set the camera on a tripod, or steady surface. Make the surrounding area as dark as possible (if outside, shoot at night, or if inside, cut the lights off). It looks like these two flowers are still growing, so I am kinda working around the assumption that you don't want them moved.
Get a small, pen-sized flashlight. Set the timer on your camera, focus, cut the lights off, then "paint" the leaves with the flashlight. Use a long exposure to be sure to get good coverage. This gives it a soft look and a kind of glow that can add interest.
OR, using the tripod, timer, and long exposure, backlight the flowers by placing the flashlight under/behind them. Most petals will allow enough light through to give a really cool effect. Again, I am making some assumptions about the capability of your camera, but I think most of the powershots will allow at least shutter or aperture priority modes, so you could use that to force the shutter "open."
Compositionally, while the head on approach is good to "document" flowers, try playing with different angles to find some that are really fun. Ursula has some absolutely AWESOME flower shots, so if you like this branch of photography, be sure to look at her portfolion. She seems to make flower sing in her pictures.
I hope this helps and has not been to presumptious. You're off to a good start at dpc, and I look forward to seeing your future entries!
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