MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT
I used the Canon EOS 5D Mark III with the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo Lens and three extension tubes to photograph dead insects I’ve found. The process became very exciting after I realized how far a gap there was between what the naked human eye can see and the extent of detail the lens was capable of showing. After this point; every time I found a dead insect, I was very excited and impatient to point the lens towards it and explore its surfaces like flying through an alien planets landscapes with a helicopter. It shocked me how alien the creatures we encounter and interact with everyday seemed under the lens and this excitement of exploration became my drive. The aim of the project was to bring this alien world that we are blind to although it’s always present around our lives, before our eyes. I took two types of photographs in terms of how the subject was approached; I photographed the surfaces of the insects bodies and limbs as if they were elements of a landscape and I photographed their faces as if it was a portrait of a person or an alien. The trickiest part of the process was to find dead insects since they needed to be static for me to be able to photograph them with a setup calling for such precision. Also quite challenging was that while photographing in this scale, a very small change in the camera position or angle results in a very noticeable change in the viewfinder and almost completely shifts the field of focus which at this scale becomes so narrow that sometimes it becomes a necessity to use focus stacking in which case the subject must surely be static and not differ in position between shots. The third challenge was the lighting. With such a long lens setup, it is very hard for light to reach the sensor so the light I used was so intense and close to the subject that no live insect would stay comfortably still under it and wait for me to photograph it.
Project supervised by Murat Germen
