Small Worlds

I spent about forty minutes lying face-down in a meadow last summer trying to get a shot of a bee.

Not a bumblebee — something smaller, metallic green, a sweat bee working a patch of clover at the edge of a trail near the river. The light was angled just right, hitting the iridescence of its thorax, and I wanted it. Every time I got close enough, I'd breathe wrong and it would move.

That's most of macro photography: you want the thing, and the thing is indifferent to your wanting.

Why Macro

I started doing macro work as a way to keep myself photographically honest during seasons when I didn't have portrait sessions or commercial work lined up. The practice of it — the slowing down, the near-total focus on a very small area of the world — turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

There's something instructive about working at that scale. You can't fake attention. You can't be in your head about other things. If you're not fully present with a three-millimeter insect, it will be gone before you've decided what you think of it.

The Olympic Peninsula as Backdrop

I live and work in Port Angeles, and the variety of habitat here — tidal zones, old-growth forest, meadows, upland scrub — means there's genuinely extraordinary macro subject matter within twenty minutes in nearly any direction.

In late summer, the wildflower meadows on the foothills of the Olympics produce a density of insect life that I don't think I'd encounter anywhere else I've lived. Bumblebees, digger bees, hover flies, various beetles. Dragonflies over any standing water. Spiders building webs between the grasses before the dew burns off in the morning.

The same meadow, photographed at macro scale, looks nothing like the meadow you'd see walking through it. Up close, it's dense and strange and slightly alien. That gap between the visible world and the photographed world is what keeps me coming back.

Patience as Practice

People sometimes ask what gear makes macro photography possible, and the honest answer is that gear is almost beside the point. The practice is mostly about learning to wait.

You find your subject. You get to its level — literally, on your stomach in most cases. You get your focus point. And then you wait for the moment when the subject is still, and your breathing is still, and the breeze has paused, and the light is good, and the framing is what you want. That can take two minutes or twenty. Either way, you'll be closer to the ground than you'd planned.

There's something meditative about it. I don't have a more sophisticated way to describe it than that — extended concentration on a small thing, in a quiet place, in the middle of an afternoon when the rest of the world is moving fast. It tends to feel useful.

The Green Bee

I got the shot, eventually. Three frames, all slightly different — it was cleaning its face, which is apparently something sweat bees do — and one of them has the focus right and the catchlight in the eye and the iridescence reading the way I wanted.

It's one of my favorites from last year. Not because it's technically exceptional, but because I remember the forty minutes it took to earn it.

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Fine art prints from my Pacific Northwest nature work are available. If you're interested in a print, get in touch.