Mountains out of molehills, literally

zooming in on the world of macro photographers

November 04, 2014 07:12 pm | Updated 07:12 pm IST

Nagesh Jayaraman, Macro Photographer. Photo: R. Ravindran

Nagesh Jayaraman, Macro Photographer. Photo: R. Ravindran

Its a whole new world of miniscule feet, tiny heads with beady eyes, and startlingly colourful wings lives in our backyard garden. From butterflies called common tiger to garden lizards that seem to do push-ups, there’s so much to observe. This slice of green also provides succour for Nature-lovers who want to photograph wildlife — all they have to do is pick up their cameras, turn on the macro mode, and click away. Insect photography, broadly referred to as macro photography, is gradually spreading its wings in the city.

Sunder Gurusamy, who is in the food manufacturing industry, started photographing insects eight years ago. “Nature is my area of interest. But I don’t have the time to travel far from Chennai,” says the 39-year-old, who is a member of the Photographic Society of Madras. As a macro photographer, he can even shoot “for a couple of hours on a Sunday morning” in his backyard. He says the hobby is inexpensive. “One needn’t invest in high-end equipment. Even a 100 mm lens can be used to shoot macro,” he adds. Sunder’s haunts are the Theosophical Society, the IIT Madras campus, and the ECR.

IT professional K. Vaithiyanathan enjoys photographing insects at the Guindy National Park. “I started macro by photographing flowers,” he says. A contributor to Getty Images, the 31-year-old feels that “the smaller insects are often ignored.” He wants to capture their world in his camera. “Macro lenses are affordable,” he says and adds that a lot of people have started noticing the smaller creatures. “I observe a variety of spiders at home,” he says.

The foremost requirement for insect photography is patience. According to award-winning macro-photographer K. Jayaram, who has a spider and frog species named after him, one must approach the subject “gently” as they are “very sensitive to movement”. Jayaram started photographing insects long before macro lenses arrived in India and won several international awards despite a lack of sophisticated equipment. His photographs competed with those of larger animals from across the world at a time when “insects were not considered animals”.

Jayaram devised his own macro lens since there were restrictions on importing them in the past. He employed spectacle lens to enlarge insects to photograph them. “It was in the Eighties that macro lenses started arriving in India,” he says. Embedded systems engineer Nagesh Jayaraman recently bought a macro lens for Rs.5,000. A keen observer of Nature, he says he took to macro since he doesn’t have time to spare to travel. Nagesh regularly visits Chennai’s parks to shoot insects.

They bend, crawl, kneel… macro photographers sometimes move like their subjects to get a good shot. “Our body has to be flexible to follow them,” says Jayaram. But they say it’s all worth it. After all, it requires effort to get close enough to observe the patterns on a butterfly’s wings or a spider’s intricate web. To K. Narasimhan, photographing insects gives him a “different perspective of commonly seen things”. Employed at a software firm, he takes time off to shoot at the Kotturpuram Park and the Siruthavur Lake. He feels macro can even be practised using a point-and-shoot camera. “Macro lenses are the cheapest,” he says.

Naturalist Poochi Venkat, well-known for his photographs of insects, says that “insect photography is macro, but macro photography is not just about insects”. Interestingly, he started out by photographing stamps.

“Macro can manifest itself in many ways. It’s the technique of showing things out of proportion; of photographing anything beautifully tiny. It can be a button, an automobile part, a watch…”

Rahul Vallamber, for instance, photographs jewellery and food using macro lenses. He finds shooting jewellery more difficult than insects since “white stones sparkle like water and I will see my image in the stones in close-up”.

However, a lot of people such as Venkat prefer insects. For out there, “you never run out of subjects,” says Jayaram. He finds the diversity of life of the insect world fascinating. “There are millions,” adds Vaithiyanathan. In their company, “you’re often on your knees, you tend to crawl... this is Nature’s means to make you bend to its ways.”

Haunts of the city’s macro photographers

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