I state in my equipment page a lot of people try to spend their way into taking nice pictures. The images I took on my 35mm photo page were taken with a $100 Craigslist camera but could have been made on a $50 garage sale camera.

The same goes with lenses. Folks will spend a thousand dollars or more on a lens when all they needed was some fancy footwork and some knowhow.

Honeybee on a Chive
5:23pm, May 22, 2011. D3100 set to full manual with 20-80mm zoomed to 80mm, 1/250th@f5.6, ISO400, cropped and tweaked in GIMP.

This image is a result of using a $50 lens (the 28-80mm 'G') on my D3100. (By the way that lens does not autofocus on that camera!) I'm not allergic to honeybees so I was able to get within two feet of this worker bee on a frenzy. Even though this is a cheap lens, the macro focusing is incredibly close at 1.5ft, even when zoomed in! Since the D3100 is 14MP, I cropped the center of the image to create the in your face look. Then I tweaked the picture with some color saturation. Even with the crop I had enough resolution left to print it borderless on a 8.5x11 photo paper.