The 70-300 L delivers great quality close-up images. Keep in mind when shooting at short distances, especially with long lenses and/or narrow aperture settings, that DOF (Depth of Field) is going to be thin. Here I aligned the sensor plane with the primary poinsettia leaf in this frame. This allowed the entire leaf to be in good-enough focus for a good overall image. Light for this image is from mid-afternoon winter sun shining in a window. This shot was taken handheld.