Never Trust the Back of Your Camera!

f/7.1 at 1/2000th sec ISO 100 using my Nikkor 55-200mm

Something I do to keep in practice is find a photographer whose work I admire or whose technique seems challenging and try to emulate that person's style / methods. This process rarely produces anything of any real merit but it is very educational. Last night I was looking over some Karl Blossfeldt. He may have been the first "macro" photographer using a camera of his own design to take extremely detailed photographs of various flora as a teaching tool for design students. His intent aside, many of them are excellent works of art in their own right.

The distance between Blossfeldt's technique and modern digital photography is interesting to me so I set up a small white box and tried to create my own Blossfeldt. The image you see here was originally shot for black & white. I planned on adding a bit of grain in post-processing. Once I had the subject, lighting & speedlight all correctly placed the photos I was seeing on the back of my camera were very encouraging. 

But never trust the back of your camera! That screen has mislead me often. Only when I brought up the files in RAW did I see exactly what I was recording. In monochrome the subjects looked well enough, but in full color they really popped! In the end I found myself with a handful of passable Blossfeldt imitations but rendered in gorgeous colors made more outstanding by the white background pushed into cool grey by light fall-off from my strobe.

Mark William Mills