"Research, written and practical assignment (4 hours)
Throughout this lesson you’ve learnt about the various techniques used and inventors that contributed to the art form that is Photography. Choose only one, do some additional research and in your own words write a report on why you think the chosen technique contributed to what we are able to do today through photography.
Explain your research and choice of technique.
Include any images which you think are necessary to explain your thought process.
This should be 500 – 1000 words."
For this task I chose to write about Karl Blossfeldt and his macro photography.
Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as Urformen der Kunst. He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the ways in which plants grow. He believed that "the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure". Although he never had a formal training in photography Blossfeldt developed a series of home-made cameras that allowed him to photograph plant surfaces in unprecedented, magnified detail. This reflected his enduring interest in the repetitive patterns found in nature's textures and forms.
Karl Blossfeldt and his work stood out for me because he was one the first people to work with nature and the secrets of macro photography. He wanted to document the different shapes and forms not created by human hand, but only nature. At the same time his photographs are very minimalist and detailed which makes them very artistic and abstract.
Among the lenses I own the macro lens I have is my absolute favorite ( I use a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens mounted on a Nikon D610 body) and I love the idea of a capturing the macro world. For me macro photography is like discovering and capturing a world within our world, a world that our naked eye can't see, but yet it's right under our nose, all around us, everywhere. All the small details in plants and insects fascinate me and being able to zoom in to these details and capture them is just amazing. I myself have done a lot of macro photography and all it takes is to go out in your garden and look close.
Another historic figure was Wilson Bentley who was an American meteorologist and photographer and the first known person to take detailed photographs of snowflakes and record their features. He first became interested in snow crystals as a teenager on his family farm. The snowflakes were too complex to record before they melted, so he attached a bellows camera to a compound microscope and after much experimentation, photographed his first snowflake on January 15, 1885. Bentley described snowflakes as "tiny miracles of beauty" and snow crystals as "ice flowers".
Not only that they look amazing but another aspect of macro photography I find important is the use of it for capturing plants and insects botanically and historically. To save and preserve that information for future generations and see how our world changes with time. How the plants and insects evolve and change should be documented and shown and macro photography is the perfect tool for that. With the development of technology now days we are able to zoom in even deeper and capture very high quality images.
Examples of modern macro photography:
(Source: Google Images)
A common problem for macro photography is the depth of field. The more you zoom in the narrower the depth of field is and more of the photo is out of focus, which makes it hard to capture a lot of detail in one shot. Luckily we have a technique that can helps us with this problem and this technique is image stacking. It requires a few photos of the same object with different focus and then merging them in to one clear photo in your computer.
Quick example from Google:
You can find my best macro photos in my "Nature" gallery.
Sources for this report:
Google Images
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