One of the tricky problems with taking pictures of flowers is whether to use a dedicated "macro" lens such as the Nikon 105mmf2.8 macro.
I think this is a very good lens. But, if using a wide apperture - say f2.8 -5.6 - it may be difficult to achieve a desired depth of field.
There are techniques for overcoming this - namely taking of several pictures with a different focus distance and then focus stacking the set of images in Photoshop or other software.
Multiple images tends to force you into the use of a tripod. This may not be great as there is the setup time to get a good composition. Some cameras can take multiple pictures by varying the focus distance from the closest object to the furthermost that you require for a flower. There are other devices such as Arsenal that might control the camera to do this. My initial experience with Arsenal is that it wants to do multiple images way out to infinity.
So, for this exercise I wanted to try using different lenses - in the telephoto range - to see if I could achieve a suitable depth of field. I would try to bump up the ISO values and use a range of f stops. With high ISO I was expecting more noise to be part of the images but several software packages now include the ability to "denoise" as well as "sharpen"
The Rhododenrums were flowering, the day was bright but somewhat windy for most of the shots. Of interest was the multple mini-flowers and the numerous stamen, filaments and petals coming out towards the camera.
In the following cropped images, the camera used was a Nikon D500 (crop sensor) using a 28-300mm full frame lens. The apertures ranged from f18 to f36, the ISO ranged from 2800 to 14400 and the speeds from 1/100 to 1/160 sec. Most of the pictures were at a focal length of 300mm or 450mm as a 35mm equivalent. All were handheld.
On the post-processing side, the images were "denoised" in Adobe Camera Raw and then "sharpened" with Topaz. The original image was cropped to be square so that the colourful part of the flower occupied the vast majority of the image. The denoising took quite some computing time with Camera Raw so next time I will be more selective in the images to process. I did not do any local adjustments but even so the post-processing time far outweighed the time capturing the images in the field!
I am encouraged that many "macro" images of flowers is possible without carrying around a dedicated macro lens.
