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I fell in love with macro photography about a year and a half ago, going through a long learning process and taking lots of photos for many months.

It’s been an embarrassingly long time now since I took any new macro photos. It’s partly laziness in getting the bigger DSLR camera, the lenses and the extension tube out, especially if I have to change them after husband has used it with other lenses. When it comes to the technical side of photography, my memory does not retain the information for long without regular use. One gets too spoiled with today’s point and shoot cameras but ours does not have a great macro feature. Anyway, I’ve had a strong urge recently to take it up again and relearn it.

Here are some of my first little efforts. Having shot these indoors on a cloudy day, they came out very dark, but with iPhoto and PhotoShop I was thrilled to tease out some exciting-to-me results. The imperfections that I find in this kind of photography actually satisfy the artistic and creative side in me, sort of like the “happy accidents” I like to cultivate in etching and other printmaking processes.

Because I know you will ask what the subjects in these images are, I shall tell you they are small shells in a plant pot on the windowsill next to my computer desk in our home in a city on the west coast of Canada. Enjoy!