Improvised Macro Lenses
A “macro lens” is not, conceptually, anything particularly complicated. Basically, if you put a magnifying glass in front of your camera, you can obviously enlarge the image quite a bit. As it turns out, most of the Canon A-series cameras will take an adaptor (the A95 takes the LA-DC52D adaptor) that lets you put on additional lenses of the type that screw into the filter threads of the lenses of SLR cameras. Most point-and-shoots don’t have such an adaptor, but it is worthwhile to check in your manual to make sure. Sometimes the capability to take an adaptor is hidden from you. For example, the Canon A95 had what looked like a piece of decorative trim, but it popped off to expose the attachment point for the lens adaptor. Of course, if you don’t have an adaptor, you might be able to just tape on an appropriately-sized magnifying glass, like Alex Wild did with his iPhone’s camera
The cheapest kind of additional lens is the “macro lens filter”, which are generally single-element magnifying glasses that can screw into the ends of camera lenses or camera lens adaptors. These come in a lot of different sizes, so it is important that they are the right size to fit whatever you have (the LA-DC52D adaptor is a 52 mm thread). These give pretty decent magnification, but they do have some focus aberrations due to being simple, single-element lenses.
Along these same lines, Raynox makes a couple of clip-on lenses that are much higher optical quality than your run-of-the-mine macro lens filters. I have a Raynox DCR-150 lens that is good for 1.5x magnification and is a nice boost in image size without being too inconvenient to use in the field. The DCR-250 is markedly more powerful at 2.5x magnification, but this higher magnification makes it that much harder to get in focus.
There might be another, cheaper high-quality option if you have access to an old SLR lens. It turns out that if you take the lens from an SLR camera and look through it backwards, it becomes a fairly high-power magnifying lens. You can do this using a “Macro Coupling Ring”, which is an adapter ring with male threads on both sides. The lens from my old Olympus OM-2 SLR had a 49 mm filter thread, so I needed a 49mm-52mm macro coupler to attach it to the 52 mm LA-DC52D adapter.
Supporting and Focusing a Camera/Improvised Macro Lens
An arrangement like this has a very limited range of focal distances, basically it needs to be within about 1 inch of the subject and held very rigidly. The baby tripods I tried using were too tall, so a better solution was an old microscope frame, like this one:
Here we see about 10 pounds of the finest brass machining the 19th century had to offer – the frame from an old dissecting microscope, with the original optics probably having been removed and lost sometime before I was born. It then lurked around in dusty junk-filled cabinets in the lab at work for decades, waiting for its new moment in the sun. It was relatively easy to modify it so that a 1/4-20 thread stainless-steel cap screw could go through it, and thread into the tripod-mount hole on the camera. This sort of modification should be doable with pretty much any microscope frame, even a cheap kids microscope. The beauty of this setup is that the fine adjustments let you put the camera on manual focus, get it coarsely focused on the subject, and then scan the camera slightly up and down for fine focus, just like a microscope.
I’ve been getting some randomly good pics with a Nikon Coolpix L100. The issue is, it sometimes focuses, and sometimes has brainfarts (little red box, “noooo, I can’t focus!”); this will be on the exact same subject in the same lighting and same distance. I usually shut it off, converse like a sailor, then focus on something mid-range grey (like my sleeve), then try to focus on the bug again. I have shot many things in a white frisbee with a little water (the camera refuses to fucous through water or glass), as well as in the hand. I wish they’d make those otherwise useful point and shoots with a manual override on the focus!