My dad loved macro photography. I remember the Christmas before he got sick that I went to visit my mother and him at their home outside of New Orleans. One morning, he told me to call walk down the long driveway and said about halfway down I’d see a tiny little pine tree sprouting up between the cracks in the concrete. I headed out with my camera and got a shot of the seedling…it was less than a quarter of an inch tall. I showed the picture to my dad and he smiled. “You know the thing I love about macro pictures?” I didn’t answer and he continued….”When you look through the camera for a macro picture, you see things that the rest of the world misses…” I think that sums up my dad – he often saw things that the rest of the world missed. Sometimes, I think that was a source of anxiety to him, but at least in the world of photography, it was a source of joy for him. I love taking pictures with my macro lens, but I never seem to take it out that often. So,I’ve decided that a least once a week, I’m going to put my lens on my camera and head out, searching for things that other people might miss.
I have two pictures for today. I took the first one in our front yard this morning. It’s a droplet of water on a branch of the permission tree. I was shooting in manual mode and forget to change my exposure when I moved from the front of the tree to the back. It was really overcast outside so the picture ended up being very under-exposed. When I pulled it into Lightroom and tried to edit the exposure, I clicked something and the purple hues became more visible. I liked the way it looked so I kept it that way!
The next one is from the beach. The girls and I headed out there for beach clean-up as part of our church’s Great Day of Service. The girls were really productive picking up trash. After a while, they wanted to stop walking and play on the sand. While they did that, I sat and looked at the microscopic world going on around me. I saw this little guy hopping around. To give you a perspective, he is about 1/100th of the size of my little toe. I am pretty sure that he is a sand flea. He is sitting on grains of sand. Pretty cool. I wish the picture were a little sharper, but macro photography, like anything else, is a skill that improves with practice! Maybe by this time next year, I’ll have some awesome macro shots!
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