Vyacheslav Mischenko

Vyacheslav Mischenko is a Ukranian photographer who has a real passion for macro photography, and capturing what the naked eye may normally just ignore. He photographs creatures such as insects, molluscs, reptiles and amphibians, bringing the unseen and hidden beauty of the miniature world to life. What really brought my attention to his photography was how he makes his photographs so detailed and the sharpness of his subjects, together with the combination of the soft 'fantasy like' backgrounds his images have.

Mischenko has been interested in photography since childhood. His father worked as a freelance photographer for the local newspapers. Because of this, he spent many weekends in a forest along with his father, thus nature photography was a part of his life since his early days. He took his very first macro shot when he was only 10 years old, using an analog camera. With the advancement of digital photography he has re-etablished his passion for photography and has begun to engage in macro very seriously. He was taught how to hunt for mushrooms, meaning he developed a keen eye of other forms of insects and bugs. As he grew up he began capturing all his mystical findings, creating beautiful portraits of nature's smallest animals.

Personally I prefer his selection of snail photographs. I think they are truly beautiful, and depict mother nature's less-seen worlds in a breath taking manner. I want to use his techniques of photographing the less-seen world of these insects, and also training myself to really look out for subjects to photograph. 
One of my favourite photos of his is titled 'Snail Explorer'. I adore his use of vibrant colours and quirky subjects. Mischenko is very strict when it comes to his photography, his subjects must be photographed as found, and never purposefully placed in a location or else the image 'loses its magic.' 

It goes to show just how patient and observant this artist is when it comes to his photography. He is so passionate about it that he won't press the shutter button until he is certain that the image he is about to capture will be the perfect photograph.
With this kind of photography, Mischenko was voted one of the top 10 macro photographers in the world. 
Here is his website and facebook page, both of which I used for my research.

Vyacheslav Mischenko, "Snail Explorer", 2013

Here are more examples of his work:

Hanging Lizard, 2015

Untitled, 2015

Untitled, 2015

Untitled, 2014

 

Shoot 1

I was inspired by Brewster to create a couple of images using her techniques. I did a shoot using my friend Shan. That day I had asked her to wear a dress, as I felt like the shoot images would turn out better if she was wearing something a little more flowy than a pair of trousers and a t-shirt. The colour of the dress didn't matter, but I thought that if she wore a darker dress rather than a summery pale one, it would show through the image a little better when it came to introducing the double exposure.
Instead of sculpting my work from a map, I decided it would be best for me to replace the dress with different images such as that of a birds eye view of a city to one of a beautiful forest. I chose these examples because I wanted some diversity in my dresses. Rather than using a map like Brewster, I used the birds eye view of a city as I didn't want to copy her idea too much. I chose the picture of a forest as it is the opposite of a city, I liked having one rural dress and one urban dress, per say. I used images I found on the Internet as I didn't have any shots like those taken by me, and more than anything this was just a little experimental shoot to get things going underway. 

What I liked about the outcome of my images was how flexible I could be with them, I could choose any background I wanted and every image could tell a slightly different story. I experimented with four different backgrounds rather than loads more, I didn't want to spend too long on this shoot as I still had plenty of research to be getting on with. The images themselves are very simple as they're just a girl in a dress, and the editing process was so easy I didn't feel as though I needed a ton of practice with it. 

      

I used these two images for my first shoot. These were shot in JPEG using a 50mm Nikkor f1.8 lens at an aperture opening of f/8, ISO 400 and a shutter speed of 1/100. 

As this was only an experimental shoot I wasn't going to spend too long cropping and retouching the photos to make them look like they should belong on the front cover of Vogue. I opened the images up in Photoshop and then began the editing process. 

       

What I learned whilst editing these photos was that I really enjoyed fiddling about with different opacities and seeing how it alters the image in a subtle yet effective way. I didn't want the dress to be more visible than the chosen backgrounds, because I knew that it would take the focus away from the city scape or the forest. Then again I didn't want the dress to be completely invisible seeing as it would make the image look really fake and photoshopped, rather than more realistic. In the end I went with an opacity of 42% on the layer titled 'Pasted Dress'. I had cropped out the dress beforehand and pasted it onto a transparent layer, sandwiching the photo of the forest/city in between the original background layer and the dress layer. Since I lowered the opacity of the dress, the rest of the image had an opacity of 100% whereas the dress only had 42%. I chose 42% because it was the opacity which I felt made the image look best - you could still slightly see the shadows and the patterns of the dress, but the forest/city is far more prominent. 

Here are a couple of examples I printscreened whilst editing:

Original

0% Opacity

30% Opacity

38% Opacity

50% Opacity

80% Opacity

Here is just an extra little experiment I did using a different background:

Original

Beach background - opacity set to 28%

Although I generally quite like these images, there are still a couple of things I would improve on. For instance I find my cropping to be a little sketchy - I believe that in order for me to gain better results I need to put more care and patience when it comes to selecting around the part of the image I want to select - otherwise it just looks rushed and amateurish. 

Something I also want to learn to do is to shape the image, so it looks more realistic by moulding to the selection rather than just replacing it. Thanks to this shoot I have learned and gained skill in how to do effective double exposure using a digital image manipulation program. 

Here is the contact sheet of my shoot and the two images I used as backgrounds:

City of St. Louis, MO, USA. Photo by George Thomas, 2014.

A forest taken on July 30th, 2015. Photo by Natalia Ordoyne

Photographer Unknown, year unknown, location unknown

Photographer Unknown, year unknown, location unknown

Claire Brewster

Portrait of Claire Brewster

Claire Brewster is an English artists who grew up in Lincolnshire and has been living and working in London for 20 years. She has pursued art as a profession since the year 2000 and not up until recently did she start working on her sculptures as a full-time profession. Since her childhood she has always been very interested and fascinated by art. Her journey to becoming a professional artist has involved her living in Romania and Spain, where she worked for a high-profile architect’s practice amongst other things. Whilst working at this practice she always set time apart to do her own personal art, where she was her own boss and could create what she wanted to create with no boundaries.

Her work has been exhibited in various countries, varying from Manchester Art Gallery all the way to in Sydney, Australia, as well as The Corinthia Hotel in London, The Hayatt Hotel in New Orleans, and The Caledonian Hotel, in Edinburgh. As well as hotels she has had work published in books and magazines, including Vogue, Marie-Claire Maison, Casa de Arbitrare, World of Interiors etc.

Thanks to her work she has been invited to be a inaugural member of the Perrier Jouet Art Salon and Prize, where twice a year they award a prize to an artist or designer within 5 years of graduating.

Brewster uses out-of-date maps as her fabric to create detailed collages and sculptures. She is inspired by the natural environment, “My birds, insects and flowers transcend borders and pass freely between countries with scant regard for rules of immigration or the effects of biodiversity.”

Brewster also uses a light to project onto her sculptures to create a shadow, giving her work a dynamic three-dimensional effect, also giving them a feeling of life and movement. 
I found it very difficult to find much information on some of Brewster's work. One of my favourite sculptures of hers is the one of what I imagine is a hummingbird, from which I can see she has used a map of Asia to sculpt it from. The reason this is my favourite piece by her is quite possible because hummingbirds are one of my favourite types of birds, and the colours from the map are vibrant and eye-catching, unlike some of the maps she uses which are brown and, in my opinion, slightly dull. I couldn't find an exact title for the piece of work I chose to display as her best example, however I am aware that she doesn't always title each piece of work individually. This particular piece was exhibited in her "Flow Gallery" and on her website. 

Claire Brewster, "Paper Birds", 2014.

Here are some more examples of her work:

 

Untitled, 2013

Untitled, 2014

"Turtlehand thumb" - 2012