Close Up Photography and Photomicrography
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Space expands for the observer of small
subjects. Most of us will see only a finite number of grand views. But
the person who sees the small vistas finds in an acre of woods or weeds
as many possibilities as a good sized state or national park may offer
to the seeker of larger sights. Whether the photographer wishes to
record these vistas of the miniature world solely for the pleasure of
its beauties, or from some serious concern with recording a new
geography of details for science, the technical approach is the same.
Close up photography which is working at initial image magnifications
of actual size or less and photomacrography which is photography with
image magnifications greater than actual size.
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Close up photography and photomacrography
are no more difficult than any other kind of photography. They can be
done by anyone willing to read and follow brief, simple instructions.
Finding and recording things that others have not seen is an open ended
challenge, because you can find new images throughout the rest of a
long life. Every household, business office, and workshop is full of
subjects that would make impressive pictures, and the very small size
of such subjects makes their images new and strange. As a tool for
examination, analysis and recording, close up photography is unrivaled.
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Postage stamps, paper currency, and other
forms of fine engraving and printing reveal much additional detail if
examined closely. Coins, medallions, and jewelry are full of fine
forms, patterns, colors, and textures. Coarse and fine-textured fabrics
can be seen with heightened clarity, and the structure of a weave or
the sequence of a knit can be analyzed with ease, if an enlarged image
is made. Most people who enter the world of the small turn sooner or
later to nature subjects, for, with all the ingenuity of our kind,
nature outdoes us for sheer variety.
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Close up photography and photomacrography
differ, again, in the scale of magnification. The former ranges from
images made at the closest normal focusing distances of ordinary camera
lenses to images that appear as the same size as the subject. In
photomacrography (in Europe sometimes called microphotography), image
magnifications on the negative range from the same size as the subject
to between 50 and 80 times as large as the subject.
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In both close-up photography and
photomacrography we are concerned with image magnification-the relation
between the size of the original subject and the size of the image on
the film. This relation can be expressed in any of several ways; two
common methods are by proportion and by multiplication. In the
proportional method, for example, an image that is the same size a, the
subject has the relation 1:1; an image half the subject's size has the
relation 1:2. In the multiplication method, an image is identified as
being the same size as the subject by the notation x 1; an image half
the subject's size is x 1/2.
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