Not too much to say here, but since I was just commenting recently on macros, the one kind of flower macro that I really still like to work on that doesn’t involve focus stacking is where the flower I’m framing is starting to die or decay.
It’s a cliche of writing about photography, largely referencing Sontag’s work, that photography takes the connectedness of life in the flow of time and abruptly rips some piece out of experience, freezing time, giving us the sense that we can know the subject of the photo in a different way because all our attention is on it, cut off from the everyday. I suppose it’s almost a bit of a Heisenberg sense of visuality: you know something in the flow of experience—it’s there for a second at the edge of your vision, but there’s so much else you’re seeing and feeling and doing—or you freeze its position and look at the picture of it, seeing something you can’t ever see in lived experience, no matter how much you focus your attention.
Of course there’s something to that—it’s why so many people have repeated that thought. Any given spring (or fall), I’m passing through a tumult of flowerings at Swarthmore, from buds to petals swirling like rain from finished blossoms, and they’re never the same but always the same. Not in the same place, not at the same time, changed by wind and rain, by lingering cold or a sudden freeze or a heat wave, by plants that grow taller by the year, by plants that suddenly are in the full sun due to the removal of an old tree or have fallen into the shadow of a new building. And yet here’s this picture: one flower, one time, at the moment where its petals begin to dry and curl while its core still looks as ready as ever for a pollinator to drop in.
A macro lens, like a wide-angle lens, exaggerates the feeling because it sees its subject in a way that’s uncanny to the way our eyes see, even if you’re not focus-stacking. You look at a macro and it feels like something you could see but usually don’t; sometimes it’s something you really can’t see, capturing details that you’d struggle to perceive with your unaided eyes. I don’t think I can find it in me to see that as a violation of life and experience, though. It’s just one more experience that awakens me to how much more the world is than I am in the flow of my everyday.