I am very surprised with the way this photo turned out. I have always wanted to get ultra close photos of flowers like this in natural light but have never succeeded. My failures likely have much to do with the super low shutter speeds, speeds slower than one second, involved with natural light ultra close-ups. This spring I have been experimenting with my ring flash. I bought it a few years ago and it has been sitting on the shelf basically unused except for the odd occasion since then. I have never been keen on using a flash because of the unnatural flash "look" I get when using my regular flash, but my ring flash is different in that it has built in diffusers to soften the light, and after experimenting with the various settings on the flash, camera, and with my raw converter I found a routine that gives me a look that I like.
 
To get this photo I focused my macro lens to 1:1.5 magnification and moved the lens forward until the flower was in focus. I then set the ring flash to -1 2/3 output and the ratio to 4:1 (I am not sure the ratio makes a big difference). On the camera I set the mode to manual and set the f number to 14 and the shutter speed to 1/250. In manual mode the flash becomes the primary light source and automatically exposes for the values set. In other modes the flash acts only as fill light. I then framed the photo, make a micro adjustment to focus and clicked. I took this photo handheld but my hands were resting on my bag.