As autumn has more or less brought an end to my insect photography and I have no new images to show, I thought I would give an account of why I enjoy taking macro images.
My interest in photography began in the 1960’s when I bought an extremely basic two aperture sun/cloud camera while on holiday. Wishing to learn more about the subject, I enrolled in evening classes. During this enrolment, I saw a monochrome macro shot of a grasshopper which has affected the direction of my photography ever since. Something about the image intrigued me to such an extent that I could hardly wait to do some macro work myself. In fact, I had to wait a while until I could afford to buy an SLR with accessories. Looking back, I realise how much I enjoyed learning photography.
My first SLR was a Practica but I soon moved on to an Exakta Varex 2A. This camera had interchangeable pentaprism/waist level finders with a viewing screen that could be easily changed by the user. Also of note was the option to move film from one cassette to another instead of rewinding, and a built-in knife to cut off a length of film rather than process the whole roll. When using extension tubes or bellows, automatic closing of the aperture could be achieved by the addition of some external connecting rods or a double cable release. I chose the former.
Although I have taken up other hobbies over the years, macro photography is still my main interest. My natural curiosity gives me an interest in nature itself accompanied by a desire to record as much detail as possible in my macro shots. One possible downside is that I find innovations in camera technology that might improve my image quality very tempting. I am quite good at resisting this temptation, however, because I only updated from my previous camera after about 10 years.
I constantly look for faults when viewing my images so that I can make improvements in the future. This means that I am never completely satisfied with any of my photographs. As I often come across the same macro subjects, I try to get some variation by capturing different behaviour, different ‘poses’ or a higher quality image. In this regard, stacking has given me a whole new set of possibilities and challenges to explore.