I’ve had a macro lens adapter for several years now, but never had the motivation to try to get the darned thing working. The trouble with macro photography, and with using front element attachments – is that you have to work soooo close to your subject, that it’s not easy to remain comfortable for long enough to get a good shot of your subject. It’s the incredible amount of patience you need to get your composition and focus JUST right. It’s torture!

Having said all this, it’s easy to understand why it might’ve taken almost 4 years to give macro close-up photography a try. But you know what? I’m glad it took this long. Without having mastered much of the skills and techniques I now have under my belt, I don’t think I’d have been able to get the most out of the macro lens. I now have a firm grasp of the manual control parameters, which are in my opinion necessary to make the most of MACRO photography.

Once I was able to make my first reasonably sharp image illuminating the hidden dimensions we rarely take notice of, I was hooked. It was the same excitement I felt when I got my first microscope as a boy, actually. I wanted to grab everything that looked interesting and textured, to examine  it up close.

I studied some coinage and plastic gold (credit cards) whilst reflecting upon the arbitrary value we collectively hold in these pieces of metal and plastic. It can be a trip to think about, but paper and metallic coins have no intrinsic biological value to the human being. Our biological survival isn’t contingent upon the existence of money; but in some way it really does. What I mean is this, only in so far as we believe that money is necessary, does it really become a necessary part of living. I’ve heard it said that today’s currency, no longer backed by gold in the US – represents a fragile system like a house of cards, which inevitably will buckle and fail for lack of supporting structure…

Now to study that structure CLOSE-UP :

But, so far so good. We implicitly condone the status quo because frankly, we don’t dare to dream collectively.