alt Hacker NewsMacro photography is a fascinating hobby, revealing a whole new world under your nose. And you don't have to go any further than your garden or local park to go on safari.
It requires a bit of kit:
-digital camera (I use a Nikon D7000)
-macro lens (I use a Laowa 100mm). A standard lens won't be able to focus close enough.
-flash (I use a Godox). You need a decent flash to get enough light for a sharp photo. Ambient light won't cut it.
The main issue is that the depth of field (the area in front and behind the bit your are focussing on) is tiny. Usually well under a millimetre. Which makes focussing quite a challenge. Thankfully digital photos are effectively free and you can just delete the blurry ones.
It is also quite challenging to get close enough to insects to photograph (you need to be within a few mm).
There are plenty of good videos on YouTube to get you started, if you are interested.
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I picked up a binocular microscope a bit back and it’s one of my favorite nerd purchases - it’s 20x, which is enough to be interesting, but not enough to require a lot of sample prep, and the binocular setup gives you depth perception, so it feels like you’re “there” with whatever you’re looking at. I’ve mucked around with microscopes in the past, but the binocular is genuinely just fun.
I used to have a macro lens, and while I quite enjoyed it, I found that since I primarily do wildlife photography I could use a longer focal length telephoto lens at distance to get nearly as much detail by filling the frame with the subject. I have quite a few butterfly photos that were taken with a 300mm or 400mm telephoto prime, not a macro lens, and you'd be hard pressed to know the difference.
That's not true of /all/ macro photography, it depends on the specific details of the subject you're most interested in capturing. Without a macro lens you aren't going to capture the subtle textures of a butterflies wing, but you can certainly get a good photo of the entire butterfly including the textures of its eyes without a macro lens.
That said, I love doing proper macro photography. It does require a bit more kit though, you really need a ring light or a dual-flash, and a tripod and focus rail to support doing focus stacking to get extremely detailed shots. Agreed though with your sibling comment that manual focus is fine. There's really no reason to worry about refocusing on a subject once you get initial critical focus, it makes more sense to move the camera/yourself (which is the way a focus rail works).
You don't even need a macro lens. I used a kit zoom lens and some lens spacers, bought used for £60.
(I did my post-doc on slime mould decision-making)