Flower photography around the house

Hello, creatives and other people of steem!

This is my first post using the creative coin front end. I decided to use this front end to check it out, and because I think this post might qualify as a creative effort. :-)

A couple of days ago, I was out in the greenhouse taking pictures for a different post, and I decided to try out my camera on some of the flowers in the garden and around the house. My camera is a Nikon Coolpix L19, basically a nice snapshot camera. It has a close up feature, but it won't do extreme closeups. The camera has autofocus and the lenses are not setup for really close shots. It won't focus on something closer than a couple of feet away. The zoom feature helps a lot, but it still has it's limitations. Also, getting the camera to focus on a specific object, especially a small one, is tricky because it doesn't seem to focus on what's in the center of the lens, the focus is a bit above center. I didn't edit or crop these pictures in any way, this is how they came out of the camera.

So, now that I've gotten the camera discussion out of the way, let's take a look at the flowers that I photographed.
I started with this sunflower. This is a multi-head sunflower, probably a hybrid of some kind. These come up randomly in the garden every year due to the bird activity.

This is a potato flower, with borage behind it. Natural light is always challenging in one way or another.

This is the best borage flower picture that I could get with this camera. There were others that didn't make the cut. Getting the camera to focus here was tricky, and it's still not perfect.

Marigolds are easier to photograph because they're bigger.

Not quite focused sharp.

Not a marigold. LOL

A different sunflower. This one is probably a black oil sunflower, from the wild bird food. Notice the tiny bees on the flower.

I was able to get this picture of the lilly because the deer didn't eat this one. I think I managed to get a pretty good focus on this picture, there were others that didn't come out this well.

This is a flower stalk from one of my mint plants. I don't know what kind of mint it is, but it works pretty well to flavor tea. In this picture I was using my hand to give the camera something to focus on.

After that, I decided to try using a clipboard behind the flower for the camera's focus sensor. I think this one came out better than the previous one.

So this is my first foray into creative photography. I'm thinking that if I were to want to continue with this, getting a better camera would probably be a good idea. It doesn't have to be really fancy, but I do need to be able to control the focus point, and better lenses for close up work would be helpful also. Something to think about for the future.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!