New camera, pictures!

[Badger711]

Whatever you do, don't go with a canon brand lens for macro, Tokina has an excellent reputation and at half the cost it's a steal. I was looking at their 105mm macro earlier, and can't find a bad word about them. A few suggestions: Tape/elastic band a piece of a milk jug over your flash, and it'll work as a diffuser to cut down on sharp shadows/lines defining them. Works awesome in a light tent, way cheaper than buying a bigger flash/diffuser, and if you play around with manual mode, here's a few fundamentals:

Aperture (f/X.X; aka F-stop): is what determines Depth of Field, or how much of the picture is in focus. One of the three components of the "Exposure Triangle).

Shutter Speed (X/XXX): is well, how fast the shutter opens and closes, exposing the camera's sensor to the image.

ISO/Film Speed (200,400, etc.): Is how sensitive the camera's sensor is to light, the higher the number, the more sensitive. The higher ISO you set though, the more noise that you get in the photo, which are little off-color pixels in the picture which make it look sort of fuzzy.

All three of these things contribute to what is called the exposure triangle. You combine how far open the aperture is, with how long the sensor is exposed, and how sensitive the sensor is to light and you get the exposure of an image. A picture that is underexposed is generally dark, and overexposed images are usually very bright/white and lack contrast. If you use Canon's editing software which you should have gotten with the camera, you can tweak the exposure more or less.