Sunday, February 23, 2025
By Mike Moats Photography
Back in the early 2,000s I was known as the leaf guy. I was on a site called naturephotographers.net posting one leaf image after another.
I was fascinated with all the different kinds of leaves and all the different ways to photograph them in different kinds of backgrounds though out the four seasons.
On naturephotographers.net I was getting a lot of attention for my leaf images as I was producing unique images that no one else was showing.
It was my own unique style and look. This went on for a couple years and I remember a photographer friend who is a successful commercial photographer telling me that this was a phase that I would grow out of.
I thought no way, I going to being shooting leaves for a long time, but he was right as there came a point that I had tired of shooting leaves, and it was time to move on.
Over the 20 years I have been creating macro/close-up images I have found myself continually growing as a photographer.
I've gone through many styles, shooting soft focus, shooting with everything in focus, working with special lighting effects, shooting all forms of nature and non-nature subjects, and using different kinds of creative post processing techniques and so on.
My latest style is to shoot with everything in focus at the highest f/stops, like f/32.
I teach how to get everything in focus without having to focus stack and how to correct the softness from diffraction when shooting in higher f/stop numbers.
For many years I taught how to shoot a subject completely in focus while blurring the background into a solid color allowing the viewer to see a subject without any distractions.
In recent years I no longer teach that method, as I've simplified ways of getting the same results of a blurred background using printed backgrounds that I've created and placed behind the subject to avoid the clutter.
All these years I have created these images with clean backgrounds, but recently I have grown tired of the solid blurred background and have started adding creative textures in the backgrounds through post processing programs.
For the last five years Smart Photo Editor has been my go-to software for enhancements to my images, and if you see my recent images that I have posted you may have noticed this change happening.
The point of this post is that we are always growing as photographers and that's a good thing, it keeps us inspired and it makes photography fun as these changes happen.
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