Fine Art Photography Blog

Bored one cold, dark night in the upper left corner of our map, I found another use for the fire. Today, the sun went down around 4:30 pm, although the Olympic Mountain Range across the water to the west means we loose sight early. It would be an exaggeration to call us the land of the midnight sun, but it certainly feels like eternal night in the winter here.

We respond by staying indoors, drinking lots of coffee, dressing like Eskimos for the occasional sprint from the door to the car. We find “indoor activities.” We feel like miniature Alaskans, bound to The North not just by our coastal mountains, totem poles, and frontier heritage, but also by our brutal climate. It was against this context that photographing two pennies seemed like a reasonable way to pass time:
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This miniature world is hidden in day-to-day life, giving you access to an unfamiliar world of fine detail. Along with the lost sense of scale, exemplified by MC Escher, this is a key element in a lot of abstract art.

Definition: “Macro” Photography

Macro simply means shooting close-ups; technically it means “life-size” or 1:1 magnification. The size of the image on the film plane can be as large as it is in real life. This strict technical definition is being eroded; zoom lenses that achieve 1:4 - quarter-sized reproduction - call themselves macro, and compact digital cameras measure their macro ability by how close they can get to the target, rather than how many of the chip’s pixels can be devoted to recording a small topic. So, for simplicity’s sake, in this article we’re talking about close-up photography, which doesn’t have to be specifically at a 1:1 ratio.

Obviously, this is far from”life-size;” the leaf was probably two inches across, recorded on a 35 mm digital camera, with a 135 mm f/2 L, a lens offering a sorry (for this purpose) magnification of 1:5. Some cropping was naturally in order to “get closer” to the subject.

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