pittendrigh wrote:

RE taking closeups with a less sophisticated camera.

I struggled with film technology for years. The setups are the same
(if using film or digital) but the feedback cycle is so much faster
with
digital it's easier to get the bugs worked out.

There are two ways to photograph little things closeup (and get good
results). You need specialized flash equipment (that reduces hard
shadows,
one way or another) or you need a light tent. I used little Nikon
Coolpix
995 for a long time. You can buy cameras like that for 300 bucks these
days.
Some do a better closeup job than others. Nikon has always been good
at closeups, even in their cheaper, little digey cameras.

Digital cameras in the "consumer" class are often excellent for close-up
photography. That's because the format size (the size of the
image-sensing chip) is small compared to, say, the 35mm film format.
This leads to superior depth of field, which is very important for
close-ups. The reason for increased depth of field isn't intuitively
obvious -- it has nothing to do with the lens, for example. It's all
about format size.

This advantage is not apparent in "professional" class digital cameras,
because their image-sensing chips are comparable to, or identical to,
the 35mm film format.

If you have a large-format camera, to get acceptable depth-of-field in
close-up photography you need intense lighting, which allows you to
reduce the aperture (i.e., use a large f-stop). With small-format
cameras this is not so much of a problem.

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