Here’s some more about your everyday, cheapo point-and-shoot camera, rather than expensive D-SLRs: Macro shots.
With their short focal lenghts and their small sensors (and the resulting rather large depth-of-field, that is the “depth” of the in-focus parts of the image) they’re really good for taking close-up shots. Most of those little buggers have a dedicated macro mode (have a look for a small flower-symbol somewhere on it) that allows you to get the camera really close to your subject, so that you get a good magnification. While you can achieve similar effects with a dedicated macro lens on an SLR, they easily costs 5 times as much as whole point-and-shoot camera, and you usually have a hard time getting an extensive depth-of-field. In fact, most of the time you’ll find yourself stopping down to ƒ/22 or less, and still not having enough depth-of-field. But then, stopping down the lens that much means that you also need loads of light to take the shot, and you will also get refraction problems from the small aperture… All in all, not nice.
The shot above shows the cappucino I just had a few minutes ago, snapped hand-held on my office desk, with no special lighting or anything. The camera: a 100 EUR (or less) FujiFilm Z20.
