Last weekend, I went up to San Francisco with a friend and a fellow photographer, Edgar Lee, to shoot some flowers and test out new equipments. I had just rewarded myself with a new camera, Canon 10D, and Edgar just got himself a Canon 100mm 2.8 USM Macro lens. I was interested in finding out how well the 10D would handle so I took it along with my 100mm macro lens. Since we were looking to shoot some flower with the macro lens, we visited the Strybing Arboreturm & Botanical Gardens at Golden Gate Park. It is an expansive and beautifully laid out garden. Diverse flowers and plants from all over the world were in bloom to be appreciated and photographed. The sky was overcast and provided a very good diffused and even lighting for photography.

Images below are a selection of the images I photographed that day. Most of these images are straight from the camera without any post processing except for reduction in size for web display. The 10D performed very well and the resulting images are wonderful.

At the end of the day, I was eager to download the images for a closer look. While reviewing the images, I found couple of nice surprises. The first is the mirror images of a bird on a stone. And the second is a bee hovering over a plant. I had captured these two beautiful images by sheer luck.