order to see life even better, whatever sense that makes.
Sometimes I believe I want to duplicate the experience of seeing
things as our eyes see them, where everywhere we look things are
in focus and at the same time our peripheral vision holds things just
out of sight and always beckoning for focus. There is a mystery in
the way our eyes work IMO. It is hard to put into words but I am
confident I am not the only photographer with this goal. My interest
in close-up nature photography started in the mid-1950s but it was
not until many years later that it really took hold and these last
many years it has been a real passion.
When I was not satisfied with traditional single-shot photos I
wandered into focus stacking which had the side-effect (an
expensive one) of demanding better and better lenses. At first it
was just sharpness I yearned for but I found out that sharpness
finally depends on color and so I soon was collecting APO lenses
that would fit on a Nikon mount. And so it went.
But that too ran its course and while I was finally happy with the
resolution and sharpness I was getting with focus stacking, the
resulting photos (however sharp) were too confined. In other words,
by getting closer in on the subject I no longer had enough
surrounding space. Makes sense? The subjects were perfect but
the context, the space around them, was not broad enough to tell
their story fully.
This led to wide-angle lenses like the Nikon 14-24mm and the new
Nikon 35mm G f/1.4 and so on in an attempt to get a wider view but
still hold the detail. These wide-angles are great lenses and they
were wide enough but I felt that the sharpness of the subject was
not detailed or fine enough IMO. Obviously I was trying to make two
opposites meet, thus the use of the term ‘oxymoron” earlier. I
couldn’t eat my cake and still have it too. Frustrating.
Then I saw the wonderful photography of Fred Nirque posted on
the NikonGear.com forum. Nirque was getting something like I had
imagined only he was doing whole landscapes and my dream was
more about mini-landscapes, dioramas, what I call “macro
landscapes” or just “small worlds.”
Nirgue pointed out to me the value of the 16mm Nikon rectilinear
fisheye and I played with that for a while. The rectilinear 16mm
fisheye (when straightened out) had the space I was yearning for
but the details were not in-focus enough for me. More recently