The S2IS is great for photographing butterlies, dragonflies, or other small creatures because the long telephoto lets you stay about 3 feet away without disturbing the critter. This causes two problems though. First, if you want to get a bit smaller than 4 inches across using the telephoto setting, you can't. Second, the camera often focuses on the background, missing the critter completely!

So how can we make life a bit easier?

I bought a +1 closeup lens in the hopes of improving the situation. The results were excellent. Now the camera's focus range is very narrow, somewhere between 2 or 3 feet, and the frame size is about half what it used to be. This means I can focus on slightly smaller objects if I want to, but best of all it means I can use autofocus much more effectively, because it doesn't try to focus on background objects anymore. This also has the side effect of speeding up the autofocus.

Here's a sample photo I was able to take the other day, using autofocus.
http://gallery.photo.net/photo/3598502-lg.jpg

This was taken with generic +1 closeup lens I bought on eBay for $8. It would have been a tricky shot without the lens, because there is a lot of long grass in the background that my camera would otherwise try to focus on. I hope this info is useful to all you macro shooters out there!