Macro Photography - Statement of Intent

Assignment Title

Nature's Beauty

Professional Application

The professional applications of this type of photography includes nature publications, both internet based and commercial magazines.  With the increase in people's interest in nature and conservation, partly due to television programmes (for example David Attenborough's series 'Life'), close up images of the natural world are becoming more widely used.  Although in recent years, some advertisers are using macro photography to promote a number of consumer goods, especially where the items are small, where the intention is to emphasise the small size of the product.

Intention

My intention with this photographic project is to explore the beauty of nature, in a way that is often missed because of the way we see things, especially in today's busy world where we rarely have time to look and see a lot of the world around us. But where I want differ from some macro photographers, is that I do not want to concentrate on spiders and other insects, because I feel that there is more to the micro world than insects, like nature's architecture which can be seen in the construction of a simple leaf.

Purpose of this Project

The purpose of this photography is two fold. Firstly, I want to explore this micro world that we never see and try to capture this world in my photography. Secondly, I would like to take forward some of the techniques that I learnt during my last photographic project, product photography, by taking it outside and into the natural world where you cannot control everything, unlike in a photographic studio.

Stimulus

The stimulus for this project originally started after I took some photographs in our garden, after some rain had stopped, basically to try out a macro mode on my Fujifilm Finepix S7000 bridge camera, which has two macro modes one being supermacro mode where the camera is supposed to focus down to 25mm. With the rain drops still on the leaves, I liked how they refracted the light, in the same way as a glass lens does.  This started me looking more at this area of photography, but only as an interest.  This interest became reignited when I was looking at product photography.

Inspirations

Something that has inspired me is some of the early photographs that I took to try out some camera options, together with seeing some of the nature programmes on television, having grown up with seeing Jacques Cousteau, an underwater film maker and explorer, who brought the wonders of the undersea world into millions of homes, and some of nature programmes. Since I took those original photographs, I have been inspired to look at what other photographers have been photographing, but I chose not to cover insects as I feel these are only part of the unseen world, and that sometimes people have concentrated too much on these.

Techniques and Equipment

For this project I want to build on some of the techniques that I learnt during the product photography project, but working outside in natural light as much as possible. How I want to capture these photographs is in a way that the viewer can see the world that is often missed, because it is so minute and cannot be easily seen, but this is another unseen world, that I feel people should see, and that is what I want the viewer to see, and then often they look closer, like I did, to what they see in their daily life. For this project I will be using a combination of both cameras, with the Pentax I will be using the 18 - 200 mm lens, which has a macro facility, which would allow me to use the power and facilities of the Pentax camera with the macro ability of the lens. To use natural light as much as possible I may use reflectors to bounce light, where it would otherwise not reach.