Insects
To do qualitative pictures of various bugs, butterflies and other small insects, it is absolutely unessential to have the most abrupt, big "mirror-image" camera. Successful pictures can be made even with a small digital "soap" camera.
Last year august I have decided to buy digital photocamera. I wanted small pocket device as I assumed to use it for taking pictures of various biotopes and insects' fodder plants during expeditions and short excursions, and also for photographic copying rare entomological books and papers in libraries.
After searching a lot among digital cameras from Olympus, Panasonic, Sony, Nikon and Canon, I have chosen a camera "Nikon Coolpix 7900". This camera (a size 88 õ 60 õ 36 mm, weight of 150g), allows gaining 7-mexapixels (a size of a shot 3072 õ 2304 pixels), good objective (3 aliquot optical zoom, a focal length of 7,8 23,4 mm, relative aperture 2,8 4,9 and a regime of macroshooting from 4 sm), rather "quiet" matrix (sensitivity 50, 100, 200 and 400 ISO), possibility of the correction of an exposure and balance white .
Now, after the whole year of using that and having made 9 thousand pictures (in nature, in laboratory conditions and through a binocular microscope), I can tell, that this camera has turned out as a quite suitable for a bugs and other small animals macrophotos. The technique of insects photo with this digital camera through a microscope is already available on out site, therefore we will observe some features of macroshooting of live bugs and others invertebrates with this camera in the nature.
I think that discussing a topic on "that, where and when to shoot?", and laws of "picture construction" and "composition" as well are no present necessity. All this in detail is presented by Jury Arakcheev in his book "Precept of the photographer shooting the nature". Also there is no sense to tell here about ways of application of the built-in photoflash. In most cases use of the built-in flash when shooting at short range does not give satisfactory results, therefore I prefer to do macropictures at a daylight illumination and flash in my camera is almost always disconnected.
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