Nice Light?

Golden is probably the best way to describe the light this evening.  The sun was quite low in the sky and illuminated the plants and flowers in the garden in quite lovely ways.  The first shot is of an impatiens straining towards the setting sun.  I know of at least one person who'll be disappointed that the flower is facing the wrong way, but I just couldn't get a flower head on and get the light passing through the leaves. I got a bit of flare in this image which I think adds to the effect.  What do you think?

The second shot is from the front of an impatiens.  Quite a different effect from the first image, but I liked this because of the "glitter" type effect on the flower's petals.  The two shots were taken within a few minutes of each other ... one towards the sun, one away from the sun.  Any preference?

Whilst working on my 50mm lens project I took a number of shots of various flowers in the garden, and was quite pleased with the control over depth of field I had.  This next shot is with a 200mm focal length yet shot at f8.  Due to the proximity of the lens to the flower the background is somewhat blurred whilst retaining sharp focus on the flower head itself.

Oh, I forgot to mention.  Each of the images in this post are unmodified in anyway save for a conversion from RAW to JPEG.  No crops, no saturation or sharpness twiddles or anything else unhealthy :-)

Also, don't forget you can click on an image to enlarge it and see it a bit bigger.  I'd recommend you did this for the first shot at least and let me know what you think.