Bugs in the limelight
When I spot a dead bug in the house, I go looking for my dust pan. When Francis J. Prior sees one, he takes more care because it’s likely he has found his next model. When seen through the macro lens of a photographer, insects are the most extraordinary creatures. Utterly alien, they meet your gaze with giant compound orbs, each facet an individual lens; they scuttle on multiple legs and test diaphanous wings in flight. They operate on a scale that transforms the world in ways we’d find hard to imagine even as their strange anatomy can move you to wonder. You couldn’t imagine it till you saw it, but inspiring that sort of awe is precisely what Francis wants to do.
Francis
“I have always said, ‘what one can’t see one cannot appreciate’,” Francis tells the Mirror Magazine over an email interview. “This statement applies to macro in every way possible. By taking time out to get down low and actually come face to face with a spider as it gazes up at you with its eight wondrous eyes, you can only wonder what else there is to see past our limit of vision.” Just 19 years old, this young photographer first got interested in the field when he bought a DSLR camera in 2011.
Though pleased to have something with which to capture all those “important moments” in his life, he found he soon got bored of conventional photography and began casting about for a more interesting use for his camera.
He knew he had found it when he stumbled across the work of the American photographer Thomas Shahan. “After scrolling through his jaw dropping images and reading everything he had to say about his work, I then and there decided what I was going to do with my camera and how I was to do it,” says Francis. Over the next six months he experimented with every cheap lens and guide he could find online until he figured out how to get up close and personal with an insect.
Determined to find alternatives to the expensive specialised macro lenses and professional focus stacking rails, Francis and a friend actually designed and built their own focus stacking rail that allowed them to get to 0.1mm from a subject, and capture it in 40 x magnifications, without any loss of quality from the image. Says Francis, “People must keep in mind that Macro photography can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be… Anyone can do it, but going the extra mile is key.”
Recently Francis was adjudged the overall winner and winner of the 16-18 categories in the RSPCA Young Photographer Awards 2012. The RSPCA is one of the most prestigious photography competitions solely for under 19s in the UK. Though his subjects can be camera shy, Francis is still enthralled by them. Eyes are a particular obsession – the fine details on the lenses of the eye of a fly that detect light up to 5x faster than any human, or the eyes that a Jumping Spider has quite literally, on the back of its head. The latter is a favourite with Francis.
A fly
An active hunter, the Jumping Spider has eight eyes with a full 360 degree vision like many others of its kind. “Holding them is great, they will turn their bodies and head to look up into your eyes, so hence they are fully interactive animals. People always forget that, just because these insects and spiders are small, they are still by far the most amazing creatures on earth and are animals to be respected!”
Francis who is currently studying Biology at Aberystwyth University, U.K, considers photography a very rewarding hobby. Having studied Zoology for one year, he knows quite a bit about insects and spiders but still has a lot to learn and says photography is one of the best ways to do that.
The bugs he finds are sometimes alive, sometimes dead. “I go out and about in the garden, fields, woodland, to find an array of different bugs to photograph in my home studio or with my camera in the field,” says Francis. “Insects have more advanced systems than anyone could ever imagine, and capturing these wondrous designs is what gives me that buzz once I sit back after hours of work and look at that one photo that I know will get a reaction.”
Find Francis online at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Francis-Priors-Macro-Photography/126069520823109Photography/126069520823109
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