We have this nice lily sitting on our coffee table so I took some photographs of it last night. I had never had much luck getting a black background behind an image, but this worked out okay. I used the Pentax *ist D and either a 50/1.4 or 90/2.5 lens (I wasn't keeping notes on which lenses were used for which shots and since these aren't F or FA lenses the camera doesn't know). The onboard flash was used for lighting. You can see reflections from it in a few places. f/16 gave good depth of field while remaining sharp. Shutter speed was 1/150 (sync speed of the camera) and I shot at ISO 200.
http://phred.org/~alex/pictures/pentax-istd/reduced/lily.jpg is what I ended up with post processing. The processing was to drop the background to full black, remove a few highlights, crop, rotate, and a little sharpening. http://phred.org/~alex/pictures/pentax-istd/lily-original.jpg shows what I started with. The only processing here was to resize the file. I was impressed at how good the TTL control was for closeup images. I always had poor luck using the flash for closeups when using other camera systems. I think that this shot would have been better with another flash to try and soften the shadows. I really like this camera. alex
