Elsewhere on this forum, I've been very passionate about the image quality that comes out of pretty much every macro lens ever built. No-one, it seems, makes bad ones, even those manufacturers who are more than capable of churning out a dozen bad zooms a month. Macro lenses are great and they can double up as (admittedly sometimes rather slow-focusing) portrait lenses too. But they can also be expensive. So here are some ways of achieving macro shots which don't involve dedicated macro lenses...

1.) If you've only got a dSLR, borrow your friend's digicam and use that - it'll probably have a perfectly acceptable macro function on it!

2.) Close-up lenses. These are cheaply available and are basically filters that you screw onto the front of any lens and act as magnifying glasses.

3.) Go really low tech: hold a magnifying glass between your camera and your subject. You'll be amazed as the results you can achieve.

4.) Crop unwanted elements of a picture and enlarge the rest. Picture qulity deteriorates, obviously, but if it's just a small print you wanted anyway, it doesn't matter.

5.) My revelation of the week: use an extension tube and a telephoto lens... You'll be limited to what you can focus on (usually anything between 1 and 2m with a long telephoto), but it doesn mean you can photograph very small objects from rather far away... Use a flash if you can as this kind of setup can be rather difficult to handhold...

Hmm... my photo links seem to have vanished...

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Nifty insects!

In the old days there was yet another way to macro: the lens reverser.

Not to be morbid or morose & to continue to go on and on and on and on about my stolen DSC707 or anything. But weren't these quite something for handheld standard no frills or magnifying glasses or anything shots.......

Deeeep sighhhhhhhhh

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Ah yes, the lens reverser - actually, I saw one of these on eBay today while I was looking for something else... Not convinced about putting the entire weight of the lens on the filter thread though... Something rather unnatural about that...

Katheric, what a nice frog. Have you stopped to wonder what kind of pictures the new, illegitimate owner of your camera's been taking? Bet they're not as nice as froggy...

Well actually the memory stick did have a few questionable images on it. A bit of horseplay, you know what I mean... We are still waiting for my partner to make his dubious debut on the internet!

Gosh! how very modern...

I just saw something I haven't seen before in the B&H catalog (Yeah, I work some days each week across the street from their store): A Macro Coupler!

Unlike the old lens reversers, which simply turned your regular lens backwards, these are meant to mount a standard lens backwards in front of a tele lens. It's basically a ring with two male filter threads.

For $8 I might just end up getting one, for my Olympus, an 85mm f2 coupled to a 50mm f1.4 or the 50 f1.8...

I found a very useful site on all of this:
http://www.nikonlinks.com/unklbil/macro_adapter.htm

Still, I'm with Pup, that a good prime macro is a great thing to have.