I decided to bite the bullet and invested in a second hand Nikkor 105mm AF-D lens -- not the VR version. I shot some tests and it looks much more promising than my 50mm + extension tube system. What I was looking were the following:
- Depth of field: the 50mm system gave me only about 2mm to work with. There was no way I could not capture the whole body of a bee with it. The Nikkor 105mm gives you something somewhere between 1.5mm (at maximum aperture) 10mm (at f/16) to 25+mm (at f/57 at 1:1 macro). This greater DOF will be extremely useful when shooting without (and also with) a tripod.
- At minimum aperture, the picture in the viewfinder through the 50mm system is completely dark so it is nearly impossible to focus on the subject. It helps in bright daylight but light is not always available. With the 105mm lens, the aperture stays wide open until you release the shutter. This way, you can easily focus on the subject.
Some issues I found:
- Not that I did not know, but things become quite jittery at macro level. Without a tripod it is hard to obtain a sharp picture unless there is a strong source of light.
- The Auto Focus system is a bit hard to use. I use this lens with my D300 and I was trying to shoot a ruler at a 45 degree angle to gauge the DOF. The AF has no problem with hunting for a focus point 40cm away but was having some problems at really close distance. I'd be better off using manual focus in this case.
Well, I took some shots of a house fly on a flower (weird uh?) yesterday. I was quite happy with the result. I used the built-in flash for these shots (image contrast adjusted and image sharpened a tad bit in Irfanview):
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