1/1600 at F/8.0 ISO 2000.  I cropped and applied some vignetting to it.  Is vignetting a word?

I set up with a black backdrop on a table, pointed a couple of shop lights using “daylight” bulbs at the flowers and shot from various angles and with various apertures.  I used my Tamron 2.8 lens.  These three turned out the best in decreasing order.

The first one here I put a couple of lights towards the back to get a glow and used a front light to get the detail.  I pulled the flower out of the background and replaced it with a solid black. 

Believe it or not, this one is on the background as shot.  I turned off all but one light, shot from above and had a wide open aperture. 

 I’m not so sure I like this last one.  The flowers are a bit too small for the vase and I did not feather the selection enough so the flowers are a bit sharp against the background. 

My mother tells of a time she convinced my dad to stop and pick up some cattails (a flowering, seeding plant that looks like a cat’s tail) intending to bring them home to us kids. He got very dirty getting them but mom was happy. She put them under the car seat to keep them safe for the drive home. She forgot them.

If you have any experience with cattails you know they will seed whether they are stuck in the ground or not. These things seeded out and waited under the car seat for just the right moment. Mom opened a car window which blew these millions of seeds into the air, inside the car… They are coughing and choking on these flowering, fluffy seeds and cannot see a thing as they are driving down the highway.

The way mom tells it, dad was not too happy at all and had absolutely no sense of humor about it. I don’t think they ever got the seeds entirely out of the car.

I was walking around a small pond waiting for a job interview and caught sight of these. These two were sitting out on their own. Focusing on a small area with a wide aperture (F2.8) was not easy especially from a distance great enough to not mess up my dress shoes.