Good points, wickerprints (and a very nice shot!).


I suppose it depends mostly on what/how you shoot, and personal preference for ambient vs. artificial lighting. For flowers, it's not as much of an issue since most flowers are not shot at that high a magnification, meaning the DoF constraints of near-1:1 distances aren't much of an impact. For moving insects, a flash is pretty much required, unless it's really bright outside.


Looking overmacromy shots, I've got a lot of indoor flower shots with exposures of several seconds - those clearly require a tripod. I've got a lot of outdoor shots with exposures between 0.5-1 seconds (ferns, leaves, wood, etc.), where a tripod was needed (I don't think a monopod would work for those). I've also got a fair number of flower shots from sunny days where exposures are faster than 1/200, meaning the IS on my macro lens wasn't even needed.


The other issue with a monopod is positioning - a good tripod can get much lower to the ground.I will say that I've seen some people using a monopod with a support bracket (like this one), which can get quite close to the ground. I think a bean bag would work for those shots as well.


I really hadn't considered using a monopod for macro work, I'll give it a try. But overall, I believe that a tripod would be more useful than a monopod for most non-handheld macro shooting.