For many artistic minds, it can often feel like second nature to find the beauty and penetrating inspiration in what we see in the world all around us.
But it can be harder to seek out that same beauty in the parts of our world that are largely hidden from the naked eye.
For that, an artist needs not only the kind of special equipment that can enhance the tiniest details into clear view, but also the kind of boundless imagination that can reframe something so small into something staggering.
That’s the job of a macro photographer like Oklahoma City’s Clarence Long III.
Long’s photography work ranges from extreme close-ups of plants and insects to dramatically zoomed-in shots of colorful items and objects that form images closer to abstract expressionist paintings.
It’s a uniquely specialized skill and interest that he’s developed over less than a decade after being introduced to photography by his father.
Clarence Long III: I initially got into macro photography because of my dad.
So, my dad is a photographer. He's been a practicing artist-slash-photographer all his life, and back in, I'll say, around like 2016, he had me pick up one of his cameras and he introduced me to macro photography, landscape, portraiture, all of that.
Brett Fieldcamp: But he quickly showed a particular affinity for the strikingly magnified and creatively rich world of macrophotography, a process that allowed him to not only present the tiny details often unseen, but to highlight the hidden beauty often unappreciated.
Clarence Long III: One of the first photos I've ever taken was, like, this red flower petal on ice. And I was like “whoa, this is so cool. I absolutely love it.” And that's what really sparked my strong interest in it, because you could see a lot of detail to where a lot of people just cannot see that, because a lot of the time that large amount of detail is so naked to the human eye, you just cannot tell.
So you need something so powerful, such as a macro, high-magnification camera lens, to really zoom in and magnify that subject, so you really see all that beauty.
Brett Fieldcamp: For Long, finding and showcasing that minute beauty presents the challenge of balancing the natural with the abstract, resulting in his own unique, and often intensive, approaches to editing and presentation.
Clarence Long III: My philosophy, when it comes to macro photography, is I try to make it look naturally enhanced, even though it's just like “wait, what do you mean naturally enhanced?”
It's like, well, yeah, sure, I want to show the true raw beauty of it, but my artistic interpretation - how I wanted it to look or how I actually visually, or even mentally, see it – is I want it to look exactly how I view it in my mind.
One of my all-time favorite images was of a flower vase, zoomed in, zoomed in, zoomed in. I'm talking probably like less than a quarter inch, if not smaller, of space, and it looks like water, and that's more of like the abstract way.
Now in terms of, let's just say, if I were to capture a flower or an insect, my plan is to show as much detail as I possibly can, because that's exactly how I see it.
Brett Fieldcamp: But even as he wants viewers to see his photos the way that he sees them, he also wants them to feel the same kind of emotional resonance that he experiences when he lets his own mind wander during the shooting and editing of the tiny subjects.
And that often means drawing the viewer’s attention away from simply considering the techniques and processes used toward something much more imaginative, letting the photos morph into something else entirely, like a leaf becoming a ship’s sail or a single blooming flower becoming a striking viper.
Clarence Long III: Even though that's like the beauty of art and the abstraction of it all, sometimes you can get so lost into trying to figure out what exactly you're looking at that the meaning of it kind of leaves you.
So I like to write stories of not only the creative process behind my images, but I will literally draft a fantasy story about the photo itself.
I wrote this one narrative, I think it was like a pair of raindrops falling from the sky, or like falling from the roof, and I created a story about how the water was held captive, being stuck in the clouds. And whenever it started to rain, they fall onto the ground, and now they believe they are free.
Brett Fieldcamp: That’s the kind of creative and imaginative potential that Long hopes to inspire in the viewers of his work, but also that he encourages in other photographers and artists that might be curious about the possibilities of macrophotography, a discipline that he assures is easier to explore than you might think, even given the specialized equipment and tools required.
Clarence Long III: Yeah, you don't need to spend a lot of money on it. You really don't.
I mean, you can buy, like, extension tubes to increase the zoom-slash-magnification of it, and you can just buy an old, used camera body with a nice flash and a nice diffuser.
Macro photography is rare and it's very challenging, but no, I mean, you don't need to spend too much money. You really don't.
Brett Fieldcamp: You can currently find prints of Clarence Long III’s work at Clarity Coffee in Downtown OKC, and you can see more of his photos at clarencelongphoto.com and by following @clarencelongphoto on Instagram.
