Here is a selection of flower shots taken from my folk's garden, which was on the 24-25 April 2004 Secret Garden tour in Berkeley California. All pictures were taken with a Canon EOS-10D, 420-EX flash (mainly used with a diffusor to provide shadow fill), and the Sigma 20mm 1:1.8 EX DG Prime Lens. F-stops between 4.0 and 16 were used, depending. The camera was set to ISO-100 or 200, and AP mode for all shots. The camera was hand-held.
Generally speaking I am quite happy with the Sigma lens, though it must be noted that you can't actually take pictures at F1.8 without significant distortion. But the results are ultra sharp at F4.0-F13.
What you see here are thumbnails. The full 6-MPixel image (2-3MB) can be obtained by clicking into the thumbnail. The full images are 3072x2048 and especially suitable for 8x11 printing or for card printing (especially if you crop down to just the flower when printing on card stock). I get phenominal results when I print these things on my Canon-I960 with glossy card stock, and very good results printing non-cropped to 8.5x11.
Finally note that the depth of field effects are on purpose. I also used the flash (w/ diffusor) to explicitly recalibrate the exposure in order to generate darker backgrounds in some of the shots, and otherwise used it for shadow fill.
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