My Nikon 200 f4 Micro lens got a workout during my visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden earlier this week! I captured several macro images while walking around the grounds for a couple of hours. To view nine of the photographs from that session, please click here.

One of the pictures that appealed to me was of the inside of a tulip. I faced several challenges in attempting to capture the picture.

• First, it was very windy, so the tulip was moving around quite a bit. So, I treated the situation somewhat like I would a sporting event. I boosted the ISO to 1600 to give me the opportunity to shorten the shutter speed (1/160th of a second). Also, I attached a clamp to the stem to minimize the movement of the flower.
• Next, it was nearly impossible to achieve enough depth of field given how close I was positioned to the tulip. I selected a narrow aperture (f/16), but that wasn't even enough to get the entire tulip into sharp focus. Bracketing photographs wasn't an option because of the movement. Of course, it goes without saying that using a tripod is key for photographs such as this one.

​After addressing some of those challenges, I wasn't pleased with the image as viewed from the screen on the back of my camera. The colors were rather dull. So, I grabbed a flash unit out of my camera bag and set the unit to trigger remotely. I handheld the flash unit behind the flower so that the petals could be backlit. By adding some light through the petals, the colors began to pop!

Inside a TulipCloseup of the inside of a tulip at the Chicago Botanic Garden at 1000 Lake Cook Road in Glencoe, Illinois on May 20, 2014 I really need to start saving the "bad" images rather than immediately deleting them from my storage card. That way, viewers can see the dramatic difference between the photographs taken with an without the flash.