Mentioned a few posts ago, a very generous neighbour let me borrow her Canon macro camera, and I’ve been using and experimenting with it for the past month. In my experience with photography, I’ve used a Nikon before for farther shots, and more recently my iPad for macro photos. Using the Canon has been a fun adventure that I’m really enjoying. When I took photography classes earlier this year (see my posts Macro Photography and Black & White Photography), my teacher lent me her macro camera, which is similar to the one I’m using now, so I’m familiar with taking photos that honour the macro perspective.
Using a camera, as opposed to my iPad, has its advantages and disadvantages. Like, for example, the finicky-ness of the focus. Macro cameras can create beautiful, zoomed-in images, but this also presents a problem. As seen below, the focus can become blurry or vague if I move even a centimeter.
Sometimes, I find an amazing photo opportunity, and then hours later when I’m looking through my photos, it’s a heartbreaking event when I realize all of the photos are blurry, fuzzy, or just don’t match up to my perfectionist principles. This can happen with using a camera or my iPad, but with limited space on the SD card I use (and therefore limiting how many photos I take on one subject), or the added touchiness of the camera, it happens more often with the Canon I’ve been using.
Along with using a camera comes necessary equipment, like an SD card, correct lenses, a neck strap, and sometimes even a tripod, if appropriate for the type of photography. It can be a bit of a pain to lug all of that around, but a camera can create a truly magical photograph that sometimes an iPad just can’t match.
There’s something inherently satisfying about using a camera to capture these photos. I’m not sure what it is – perhaps the perfect focus the lens is capable of, or the ability to zero in on the tiniest detail – but using a camera enables me to captivate and tease out the smallest, simplest things and make something captivating from them. My iPad can’t focus on a thin branch or a tiny mushroom, but the camera I use can, and with no difficulty. I used to spend an embarrassingly long amount of time tapping the screen of my iPad to get it to focus on my subject, to no avail.
I think that using an iPad has its benefits, and so does a camera. With my iPad, I’m able to take pictures farther away, but with the macro camera, it requires me to be closer to have a good focus. The photos below are examples of using my iPad and camera for different scenes, and how they create different feels with simply a different focus.
As I continue my adventures in photography, I’d love to hear from you with any tips, comments, or feedback you may have. If you’d like to get in touch with me, please see details under my Contact page, or feel free to post a comment in my comments section. Thanks for reading this, and here’s to more snaps and shots!
Perhaps you have heard of the 10,000 hour rule which states, it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials. There are a number of articles that state it is more complex than that as having a good teacher is another important factor. I belief people are gifted certain talents that allow them to achieve superior work others would never be able to achieve, no matter how many hours they put in. When it comes to photography there are many more variables, such as light, subject matter, etc. Your work reflects the characteristics of a master, thus I attribute, in your case, it is patience and your artistic talent of framing a subject. That talent could be genetic, passed down from Paul Peel (Nov 7 1860 – 1892), a world renown artist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Peel).