Suitable Camera For Macro Photography

[sunny747]

hello all, i'm new in photography. i want to take macro photo as small as gems and stone photo's for my online business. I want to capture the stunning beauty of gems or diamonds.

one thing i have in mind is to get the new Nikon d3100 and get cheap reverse lens ring.........but the whole project will cost me around 25k baht i guess.

beside Dslr camera, is there any compact digital camera especially designed for macro photography which i can find in Bangkok?

any input would be appreciated.

thanks

[VerbalKint]

Photographing gems/diamonds is not easy, besides a decent camera you would need a macro lens (I have used a 60mm 2.8 nikon, great lens) and a very good light setup. I wouldn't even try to find a cheap camera you will be very dissapointed.

[sunny747]

thanks for your reply. Few years ago, i used to take macro pics with sony cyber shot. it used to fulfill my purpose but i had to spend a lot of time to edit it by adobe photoshop (getting rid of the noise). So to take and process one pic has taken at least 20 to 25 minutes.

about the lighting, i used home made lighting system, not really difficult with LED these days.

Getting Nikon d3100 kit lens and reverse ring may help, not really sure about it.

But i'm sure there are some compact digi cam for macro photography .....i just don't know which one.

thanks again.

[hughden]

The higher quality compacts take excellent photos and are good for macro because the smaller sensor gives you a much larger depth of field than using an SLR.

The Panasonic LX5 can get really close to a subject.

[LawrenceAlexWu]

The higher quality compacts take excellent photos and are good for macro because the smaller sensor gives you a much larger depth of field than using an SLR.

The Panasonic LX5 can get really close to a subject.

http://www.thaivisa....ost__p__3942324

Likewise with the Canon G12 & G11 which can have subjects up to 1inch away. Getting close tho also means that lighting could present more problems too.

If you had to deal with a lot of NOISE...then most likely the camera automatically pushed your ISO to higher values. To avoid noise, switch your ISO to the lowest value possible. Again this may conflict with lighting the subject though.

Unless they are very very bright LED's, i would think they didn't provide enough light intensity thus the noise you got. The biggest tip here is that your shutter should not go below 1/30-1/60 second...unless you are shooting on a tripod & not pushing the shutter button (eg. set the camera on a timer or use a shutter release wire/device).

Sharpness might be another consideration!! independant lensed cameras (such as SLR's or the new micro 4/3rds cameras) will give you the sharpest results versus compact cameras...but then it also depends how big do you need the photos...if only for the web, compacts can perform just as well.

Composition though is very very important! This is a whole topic in itself. With bad composition, even the most expensive & technical camera will yield terrible results!!!