The serious insect macrophotographers like Alex Wild tend to use Canon gear, evidently Canon has made a serious effort to claim the macrophotography market and have the best macro lenses. As a result, I mostly have been looking at Canon. The lens that Wild uses for his real serious high-mag macro work doesn’t have an equivalent from any other manufacturer, unfortunately. However, the other lens that is very popular with the insect macrophotographers (and that Nikon probably has a near-equivalent for) is the Canon EF 100mm F2.8 Macro. You are probably a lot more familiar with Nikon gear than I am, and can probably sort out the nearest Nikon equivalent.

As for where to get reduced-price lenses: there are a bunch of lens rental places, and S_ found out that they sometimes sell their excess lenses at steep discounts[2]. See for example the Nikon page at lensrentals.com. If you go to the Nikkor macro/specialty lens page, they have a well-organized collection of lenses with descriptions of each, and you can actually just rent one for a week or so to try out if you want to be sure of which one to go out and buy.

Alternatively, you can try getting a macro convertor and/or extension tubes for your existing lens. This is a *lot* cheaper than a purpose-built true macro lens, and can allow very high magnification. But, there are evidently some serious focusing issues and they force a lot of fiddling around to get set up for a close-up shot.

[1] Did you know you can now get some good DSLR bodies on the used market for about the same prices as a new point-and-shoot? I got a Canon 10D body from KEH Camera Brokers just last month, and even though it is still a pretty advanced camera with decent resolution and good performance, the used one cost about a tenth what it cost new.

[2] S_ bought me the Canon EF 100mm F2.8 macro lens for Christmas from Lensrentals.com, and gave it to me early to try out because they only allowed 3 days to return it at no cost if it turned out not to be what we wanted. I’ve only been experimenting with it for a couple of days, but I am very happy with it. It is in like-new condition, and appears to be an excellent lens that will be well-suited for actually getting macro pictures of live bees and butterflies in the field (as opposed to dead or refrigerated on my microscope stage). The pictures from it will start showing up here as soon as (1) I work through some more of my picture backlog, (2) I work out how to use it to best advantage, and (3) enough small arthropods come out of hibernation.

KT: They don’t actually have eight legs, what looks like a front pair of legs is actually just very long, robust antennae. They do seem to be converging on something resembling a spider body plan, though, don’t they?