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Originally Posted by Adey Baker
Bearing in mind the title of this thread, anyone with just a compact digital camera can get very satisfactory results from the very minimum of kit.
I've seen some very good shots from cameras such as the Nikon Coolpix 4500 and provided you don't want to make big enlargements or severe crops they may be all you require if you don't want to carry lots of kit around on a warm day. (In the UK most of the favourite nature macro subjects such as butterflies and dragonflies don't want to come out to play on cool, dull days, anyway!)
A couple of years ago I tried out a Sony W1 on a number of subjects and found that the lens did not give a very good image in macro at the telephoto end of the zoom but was much better at the wide angle end. This required getting extremely close to the subject in order to get a decent-sized image of the subject and in order to make sure I didn't over-shadow it I held the camera at arms' length.
It required a bit of practice and getting to know the limitations of your equipment is important but with practice I found it was easier to approach a lot of subjects like this rather than 'over-powering' them with your whole body behind a SLR camera.
Image below 'nabbed' from Birdforum to show a typical shot (note how depth of field is quite good over most of the wing due to the relatively small size of the aperture on a very short focal-length lens)
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I used to take butterfly pictures with Sony DSC505 and like the results. But for small insects DSLR is much better.
The small insect (20mm) was taken with D50 + 60mm Nikkor macro lens. The butterfly was taken with Sony DSC505 many years back.