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The great thing with DSLRs is the possibility to exchange the lenses. As we all know they are the most important factor in taking a good photo. There are lenses for any application, which try to minimize the aberration for that special domain. For close-up photos you need a macro lense….do you really? Well there is kind of an alternative, which “transforms” your standard zoom lenses into super macro lenses. There is no magic in the process of transformation. The basic idea is apply the lense in reverse direction using the filter winding. The wider the angle of the lense the greater the zoom effect. The imaging quality is equal or even suprior to that of macro lenses.
Such a thing is called “retroadapter”, it can be seen here:

Though there are some downsides. As you use the filter winding to apply the objectiv the electronic conntacts are not connected anymore. This means you may not adjust the aperture and may not use the auto focus. The latter might be solved through manually focusing, the first problem can be solved with a little trick. Just before removing the objectiv you have to press the fade-out switch, the previously choosen aperture will be preserved.
Tips & tricks:

• choose a high aperture or the depth of field will be too small
• a tripod is a must-have
• because of the small aperture the object will be quite dark, use a flashlight while focusing
• an external flash is nice to have, though not mandatory, the internal might be blocked by the lense because of the short distance to the object
• the distance to your objec will only be some centimetres, so mind your lens

Some example pictures can be found here: