Scale

[pecunium]

I do a lot of close up work. If one is going to talk about the "essence" of photography, a lot of it has to do with distillation, reducing the image to the very kernel of what the photographer sees.

One of the things the shooter does is exclude everything extraneous; the term of art is, "gardening". It can be something as gross as moving fifteen feet to get a tree out of the landscape, or as small as pressing down a single blade of grass.

Back when I shot nothing but film, I used the camera to do a lot of my gardening. Enlarging the image loses detail, so by composing to the edge of the frame I didn't have to worry about losing detail in the crop (this is part of why I really love my F3).

There some things which get more dominant as one closes in; the two which are most evident (at least as I see things) are color, and texture.

Compare this picture:



Which has shape, and context and contrast between the tree, the fungus (a tree ear) and the leaves/sky.

Zoom in and it's all about the color yellow.



The gleam of the water droplets is nice, but the picutre is really about the color, and the fuzzy surface.

Comments

[aethereal-girl.livejournal.com]

Not if you don't have a paid account.

Or if you can, it's not obvious to me how you do so.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I see. My mistake. The oddities of the changes, and the straticfications they use to get 25USD. Oh well. I can't edit them either.

The link still works.