The Beauty of the Natural World
I got into photography as a teenager, and was soon developing my own black and white film and prints. Later, I decided to go to art school which led to making silk screened prints and pastel works. After many years my interest in photography was rekindled when digital cameras started getting really good. I bought a DSLR in 2014 and started using what I learned in art school combined with image manipulation skills learned from years in the commercial art field to produce my photography today.
I’m drawn to the wonder and beauty of the natural world. In my close-up photography of flowers and plants I expose a part of the natural world in a way not often seen by the average person. I hope that my photography would encourage a closer examination of the natural beauty around us.
I look closely at flowers and plants for interesting shapes, lines, curves, color and textures. I then try to find compositions that enhance what I’ve found. For me a successful composition is one that easily guides the viewer’s eyes around the entire frame using techniques like depth of field, leading lines, rule of thirds, color contrast, and more. I pay as much attention to the background as I do for the main subject, as it is important to me that the background supports the subject.
Inherent in macro and close-up photography is a very narrow depth of field (the area in a photo that is judged to be in focus). While the lens’s aperture setting is one way to control the depth of field, it only goes so far. Many of my photographs incorporate a technique called focus stacking which allows me to more precisely control the depth of field within the image. Focus stacking is defined as a processing technique which combines multiple images taken at different focus distances to give a resulting image with a greater depth of field than any of the individual source images. Most of my close-up photos are a result of combining around 12 images, but can range from 3 to about 40.