What camera for close ups?

[nightfly]

I'm very happy with my M4-P for street shooting however lately I've been wanting to do some sort of abstract close up work in color which is just about the polar opposite of my street shooting which is wide angle and black and white.

Besides the Leica, I have at my disposal a Pentax MX with a 50 1.4, my wife's old Canon digital elph and a Rolleicord V with some Rollinar closeup lenses.

Which of these or others would be good for getting close up photos (under 3 feet) so that they are abstracted enough to almost not know what they are (wood grains, tight product shots, that sort of thing). I'm actually leaning against the Rollei because I'd really like more of the 35mm aspect ration and am favoring the digital elph because unlike my street stuff I might be manipulating this a bit more in photoshop and working with the colors.

What do you guys like?

 

[Anupam]

Depends on how close is close, but RFs or TLRs are not good tools for closeups. SLRs and TTL viewing can't be beat and from my experience I could put forward a strong case that the Nikon F3 is the finest close-up camera ever made. Some of my F3 shots are here.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Any SLR is good, especially if you buy a Macro lens. I have macro lenses for my Olympus OM cameras (the 50mm f2 Zuiko) and I have a Sigma autofocus 50mm f2.8 macro for my Nikon digital cameras. The sigma is a good, very good, lens for little money and I think it is made in Pentax mount. A Pentax manual focus macro might be a lot cheaper than the sigma though and should be very good.

The digital Elph might work...some point-n-shoot digicams focus ridiculously close with good results! I can't remember how close yours focuses, don't which digital Elph you have (they made a million models with the digital Elph name).

 

[nightfly]

Did a little experiment with the elph, it's a Powershot S400:

I think the elph might work for this type of stuff, image quality is good enough and it lends itself to tweaking.