Good Blog for Hand Held Macro Shooting

Howdy,

So last Christmas I bought myself a Nikon 105 f/2.8 Macro lens to play with. Sarah has been learning about photography and she likes taking pictures of flowers and bugs. I've been messing with it on both the D750 and D7200 bodies, with and without flash. So far, the results have been so so and based more on luck than actual skill. This got me to start reading and checking out how other people do their shots, which brought me to this site,

http://nocroppingzone.blogspot.com/

I read the entire blog from beginning to the last entry. He does ALL of his shots hand held, with a flash, NO cropping, and without any stacking!! He mentions in a few of the entries that his keeper rate is about 1 out of 25 shots, which I find amazing. In the process of reading the old blog entries, I have learned a lot about flash photography!

If you just want to see his pictures, you can go here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dalantech/

He is a Canon shooter, specifically because of the particular macro lens he uses. Apparently, Nikon has nothing similar. I checked

Now if you want to see AMAZING work that is both hand held and tripod based, single exposure and focus stacked, natural light and flash, you need to check out this guy,

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnhallmen/

His blog is in Swedish (or whatever their language is called). However, if you look at the comments for each image, he will often have a short discussion about the subject and how he got the shot(s).

Right now, my immediate goal is to figure out a way to get my flash closer to the subjects and with better diffusion. So I will be working on some kind of DIY thingy to attach to my flash, like the Pringle tube mod seen on Pintrest.

If you want to see some of our macro attemps, check out these FB posts,

BIG FAT Moth
https://www.facebook.com/scott.friday/posts/10213932028486298

Bees, Lady Bug, and Wisteria
https://www.facebook.com/scott.friday/posts/10213932049766830

Spiders, Caterpillar, and Fly
https://www.facebook.com/scott.friday/posts/10213932182450147

Misc Flowers
https://www.facebook.com/scott.friday/posts/10213939411270863

Flowers, Sweat and Honey Bees, Butterfly, Mosquito, Flies, Cat eyes, and space scene...
https://www.facebook.com/scott.friday/posts/10213947177865023

Flowers, cool Fly, Grasshopper, some kind of tiny bug in a flower, Daddy Long Legs spider
https://www.facebook.com/scott.friday/posts/10213961052251874

Apologies for having to link to FB but I don't have the images uploaded to my regular server just yet.