These flowers were shot locally here in Mountain View by me on my Canon 1D Mark II with a 28-300mm image stabilized L-series lens.

Unfortunately, I had the ISO in the camera set to 1250 (because I had just been shooting the kittens at night in poor lighting) and forgot to change it (I wondered why I had to see the shutter speed so fast and stop down the aperture to get a proper exposure, but I thought it was just because it was so bright outside...), so the pictures are more grainy than I'd like. Fortunately, when they are scaled down for the web, as here, much of that grain is less visible. These are put here at a slightly higher resolution than some of the others (1536x1024). If you have a large, high-resolution display, you will really like this. If you have a smaller one, you would have to scroll, or just won't see the "whole picture". I did this to minimize the destructive effects of multiple re-sizings, so these are straight out of the Photoshop CS2 raw image plugin from raw original files. As always, captions are below the photos they describe.

All images are copyright by me and are for personal use only...

Orange daisy by the side of the road. This was at the intersection of Calderon and Church, across from the coin-op laundry.

Same field, showing some California Poppies along with the daisies. This shows how strong the wind was blowing. Very frustrating when you're trying to do macro work...

Some sort of flowering tree with a pretty blue background. I didn't use a polarizer for this one, but I did pump up the saturation (about +17) in the PSCS2 raw import

Close up of one of the above flowers.

Another close up. Along with the grain, you can see the texture on the flower petals. In the original, you can see the pollen texture on the tips of the flower stamen.

A macro shot of one of the unopened buds

I really am not happy with the way the RAW import plugin handled these later shots, but I was too lazy to open up the camera's JPEG'd version. You can see the furry texture on the bee and the bits of pollen.

I was just sitting there taking pictures of the blossoms and this bee flew into the shot. It seemed so intriguing, I just started following it around with the lens. These shots are a result of that chase.

A little bit too dark and contrasty for my taste. But when you're manually tweaking the RAW plugin, you have to contend with exposure AND brightness (as well as contrast, et all) and they all affect each other. I didn't feel like taking the time to fool with it, so here are the default/auto settings.

Just the flower blossom that I had originally started shooting.

Look at the texture of the bark and the buds along the the flower petals. I love my camera!!!

I love the texure of the bee's wings in this one. This is probably my favorite one with the bee in it.

This is not a daisy, like it looks like. It is actually some sort of shrub flower that borders my driveway.