I saw PIKEVI's photos a few weeks ago, and they display the flowers beautifully, as he said, the close ups are excellent.
PRISANA: The only other thing I could suggest is see if you camera has a +/- manualy setting, and put it into the "+" mode, this may manually override the light meter to give you a higher reading.
The reason it doesn't go high, is that some maufacturers of consumer level digital cameras have a saftey cut off limit for the chip so that it doesn't burn out. There is only so much light that they can absort before "burning" out the image from overexposure, so to avoid this, they put a saftey cut off point.
Personally I don't come at these half baked measures of combining f stops and camera speed and then using a calculator to then convert to fc /lux, and I am a professional photographer of 35 years experience.
it is great to play around with these formulae, I did it when doing my qualifications in Commercial Photography a lifetime ago, but in the REAL world productivity dictates these methods take a back seat for more realistic measuring.
THIS METHOD IS NOT ACCURATE, believe me!
My suggestion to all those people who really want to be serious about measuring footcandle/lux is to buy a dedicated meter to do this.
After I run a few Saturday morning errrands (she who must be obeyed is in bed with a cold) I will photograph my meter and post it here for you all to see.
It has a range of 0.000 to 4000 fc and 0.00 to 40000 lux which I think will cover MOST people's needs.
If anyone is interested, I will post where you can buy them, and for how much, as it came from the States. Maybe we can arrange for a bulk purchase and get a discount.