Lillys and other flowers

These pictures were taken on July 31st, 2009 in our back yard. I'm trying to develop a technique for taking pictures of flowers. These pictures were taken with a Canon 40D camera with an EOS 100-400mm lens and most shots were at about 400mm. One these shots I used f16 or f22 settings so that I would have a wider depth of field to keep all of the flower in focus. This did cause some of the backgrounds to be a little messy instead of having a completely out of focus, uniform background. I also used a flash with a better beamer attached to concentrate the light on the flower and in a lot of cases, make the background under exposed and uniform. I used a manual exposure and took test shots to gain the effect I was after. Shutter speed for most of the shots was about 1/200th of a second. ISO was set at 400. Some of the shots came out fairly good and I hope you like them. Double click on the images to see the real detail of these flowers.