Both these images were shot with my pre-focused (manual focus) Tokina 90mm macro.
At this close a focus setting (1:2 life-size) even f11 gives a very narrow depth of field; so you get quite a few 'misses' and I'd never have had the confidence to shoot this way with film.
The Exif data has indicated a shutter speed of 1/1600 of a second; those wings sure are moving fast.

Straight from the camera; an untouched .jpg file.
No noise reduction and an ISO of 800 on the D300.
This is what you can get from even quite inexpensive prime lenses and good lighting; in this case a light overcast creates nice softer contrast and captures the difficult red tonality of this rose.

This image was shot with the lovely Tokina 90mm f2.5 macro lens I scored in a wonderful piece of luck when i was perusing our local 'Trademe' online auction site (think eBay but better organised). It was passingly mentioned with a FM2 film Nikon and a nice manual-focus f1.4 50mm lens; needless to say I snapped it up at the $200 asking price. I was overjoyed to find the Tokina to be virtually mint and as great a lens as I remembered when I had an Olympus mount one on my OM4... ah the 1980's.
If you're interested in macro photography the 70's and 80's era manual focus lenses can be an excellent place to start; our D300 will even meter nikon mount ones, as will all the Pentax DSLR's the pentax k mount examples.
I'll be posting a lot of images with this lens...

Otago harbour is a fairly clean (clean enough to have a small little-neck clam 'cockle' collection business) and biologically vibrant environment with plenty of small fry and zooplankton.
This results in quite excited surges of feeding from large flocks of shags ably supported by dive-bombing terns whenever there is a concentration of food (as above); generally out in the main channel and so it's a bit difficult to get close-up shots without a *really* big lens.
These are mostly spotted shags in eclipse plumage and the smaller white-fronted terns.
It's most likely small crustaceans (krill) that they're feeding on.

Closer to shore we have the usual complement of herons,gulls and ducks but are also particularly lucky to have small flocks and random individuals of the spectacular Royal Spoonbills (Platalea regia), which as recently as a decade ago only numbered around 1000 nationally.
These (above and below) were feeding in Sawyers Bay.

Top-of-the-food-chain creatures such as these give us vital clues as to the state of the whole ecosystem.
It gives me a lift every time I see them.

One of a series of early shots I took with my, fresh out of the courier box, Tamron 70-300 vc zoom on the D300.
I still haven't used this lens all that much, but I'm very impressed with it; particularly since mine was quite a modest price on the second hand market.
I used the Nik plugin 'Vivesa' to selectively bump up the exposure on this wee guy whilst leaving the background untouched.
The weather has been so mild and dry that we have had a good breeding season for these tiny personable flycatchers.