I usually just use my scanner for making pictures of my coins. Some of the great pictures I see on these forums made me want to dig out my camera and try to take better pictures. I have a decent Canon DSLR and bought an extension tube set and a set of hang on magnifiers. I know this isn't optimum, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper than a decent macro lens and from what I've seen you can get pretty good pictures. Anyway, it seemed like every time I tried the magnifier lenses the camera would lock up to the point I had to pull the battery to even turn it off. I had about decided that my fairly new camera was broken. After a little googling I realized that the firmware needed to be upgraded as this was a fairly common problem. It was a treat going through the laborious process Canon created. You have to format an SD card, download the firmware file, put the file on the newly formatted SD card and then go through a rather unintuitive process to install it. Anyway, it worked and it seems that the problem is solved. I lost a good chunk of the afternoon to this and will have to wait until tomorrow to begin my experimentation. There's really no particular point of this post, which is why I put it in chat. Take care.
Do you have the 18-55mm kit lens? That's what I use and get good results If it's a newer DSLR it should have the Macro setting(flower)
Be sure to use whatever setting allows for manual exposure and focus, or the camera will be trying to focus a lens it senses as 'frozen' and lock up. It happens with my samsung DSLR if I forget to switch to manual on my adapters.
Generally speaking, the "macro" setting on a DLSR allows the user to get the camera "closer" to the object being photographed but the is a break even point where the shadow of the lens creeps onto the subject. Its difficult to get proper lighting when the lens is 1/2 inch away from a coin. Until I purchased a Macro Lens (that I still cannot figure out how to use!!) I would smply but my Sony digital directly up to the microscope eyepiece and shoot away.
