A few thoughts on photographing frames that come to mind:
I do a lot of bee photography with a point and shoot digital camera (albeit one that I researched carefully and has more manual controls than some).
1. Take the camera off of full automatic! Your image quality will suffer greatly when the camera decides to shoot at "high ISO" (in most cases, with the small digitals, an ISO over 200 will yield less than satisfactory results...a digital SLR with a larger sensor will do better). Set the ISO as low as possible while keeping everything else in mind.
2. Don't use the flash. You are shooting close up, and the offset between the flash and the lens will cause unnatural (and annoying) shadows and make the colors "garish".
3. You are shooting close up, so any camera shake will become apparent (remember, you will now be using a slower shutter speed without the flash and shooting with low ISO). The best way to guard against this (given that we are shooting digital, and there is no reloading the film or paying for processing of each negative), is to use the continuous shooting mode (where you hold the shutter down and the camera shoots a series of photos).
4. If you are trying to photograph into the bottom of the cells from closeup, you will have a problem that your camera will focus on the cell walls, not into the bottom. Most cameras focus (and set exposure) with the shutter pressed down halfway...do this, and then move the camera a bit closer _after_ it has focused....don't forget to use the macro settings (NOT DIGITAL MACRO).
http://picasaweb.google.com/Dean.Ramona/Closeups#5350418157664175410
5. Because depth of field (the range of distance that is "in focus") is shallow when shooting closeups, you will always have a problem of focusing on what you want to be in focus (#4 is a specific example of this). Use hint #3 (continuous shooting) and combine it with moving the camera back and forth small amounts while you are shooting continuously (remember, the focus is staying the same so you have different things in focus every frame). KEEP IN MIND THAT MOVING THE CAMERA CLOSER AND FURTHER FROM THE SUBJECT WILL INTRODUCE VERY LITTLE MOVEMENT BLUR....IF YOU MOVE OR PIVOT THE CAMERA SIDE TO SIDE OR UP AND DOWN YOU WILL LIKELY GET SOME BLUR DOING THIS. Once you get a feel for this, you will know what the range is you want to move, and also learn to move _between_ shots rather than during shots.
6. Periodically, review what you are doing by zooming in to the images and making sure they are sharp.
7. Don't use digital zoom (turn it off in the camera). You can always zoom and crop later in editing (the extent of this depends both on the resolution of the sensor in your camera and the amount of "noise" in the photo (this noise is increased greatly with ISO speed). Most of my "closeups" are somewhat to heavily cropped (I would prefer not to, but I only have a point and shoot at the moment, so I can't do fancy macro work).
8. I sometimes do a little "sharpening" of cropped images and this is a good tool if not overused.
The above is really for p&s cameras.
I'll also mention that there is a new world for those of us with a pile of GREAT lenses for our 35mm cameras....the new(ish) "micro four thirds" standard allows for virtually ALL legacy lenses to be adapted for use with cameras that adhere to the micro four thirds standard (this includes the mighty Canon FD lenses that are unable to adapt to anything else). The focal length is effectively doubled (ie, a 50mm lens for a 35mm camera will act like a 100mm lens equivalent on the micro four thirds).
All of the photos on our Picasa page are done with a canon digital elph of one kind or another (3mp, 4mp, 15mp)...and keep in mind the number of megapixles is not the only measure of clarity or sharpness...I returned a fancy 10mp camera because the shots from my 4mp elph looked much better with high magnification.
http://picasaweb.google.com/Dean.Ramona/MoreNativePollinators#
http://picasaweb.google.com/Dean.Ramona/Postcards#
http://picasaweb.google.com/Dean.Ramona/Closeups#
deknow
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