What I think about when shooting flowers
You're all worrying about a lot of the same things I do, particularly blown highlights. Because Mom Nature optimized flowers to attract insects (propagation depends on them) flowers reflect enormous amounts of infrared and UV light. Insect eyes are much more sensitive to those parts of the spectrum, with some insects relying almost completely on UV to zero in on the best flowers. That's a big part of what makes them so hard to shoot. Anybody who's shot orchids in strong light will have noticed what looks like little shiny speckles all over the flower that are blown out even though you worked really hard to get detail in the white areas that you could see. The sensor sees spectrum you don't see - those little speckles are reflective crystals (for want of a better word) that reflect UV really efficiently. You usually can only see them once you get the flower up full screen. Causes much cursing in my house.
With flowers, I do something that I seldom do with any other subject, which is consciously underexpose and pull the images up in processing. Yes, it produces a smaller dynamic range, usually, and makes images look a lot more saturated, neither of which bother me at all with flowers. Doing this can actually produce images with saturation so intense that you'll have trouble printing them, out of gamut warnings everywhere, unless you use a perfect paper/ink combo. But it does produce gorgeous, rich images.
I also learned to bracket depth of field options - I almost always shoot one or two images fully stopped down for max depth of field, and a few with various different DOF, right down to as wide open as the light will let me go. I don't think there's any right answer here, and because DOF preview is often so dark you can't really see much anyhow, I'm not sure of any other approach. This lets me make a choice between high and low DOF in a more relaxed, thoughtful mode than trying to think about it while rushing to beat the changing light.
The other thing I do all the time is shoot with flash, usually highly diffused. This makes the IR and UV problem worse sometimes (flash is full of IR and UV) but gives me more range for isolating the flower from the background (use a high shutter speed with small aperture, and everything outside of the flash range will be black, which saves me from carrying around foam core), working without a tripod (ditto ditto), etc. With the flash, I sometimes reinforce the sunlight direction for dense shadows, sometimes shoot with an emphasis on shadow fill. If you see a guy out there with camera in right hand, flash on a long cord in left, contorted into absurd positions to get both items at the right angles, that's me.
Last, I don't like to spray the flowers, or use backdrops, or move leaves, or any of those sorts of things. To use an analogy, I feel like those things are like fishing in your swimming pool, not sporting at all. Now THAT is a pure quirk. Doesn't even make sense, really. But I never said I wasn't weird.
you can usually reshoot and make good use of the digital advantage. Just think of it as having access to a great metering tool for the first shot. Also, expose w/ intention to PP, if you don't do that already.
