Levon Biss is known for shooting amazing portraits. His models span from Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L Jackson to Olympic track star Jessica Ennis-Hill and Usain Bolt. With this project, however, he wanted to do extreme macro photography. All motives had 6 legs and alien-like features…
Levon Biss lives in London but travels around the world for work assignments as a photographer. In his search for a side project to clear his mind from time to time, he came across his son’s insect collection. With his interest in the technical aspects of photography, a serious challenge emerged: how close could he get to these small creatures? Two years later after countless hours of work, Biss’ photographs were made into the exhibition “Microsculpture”.
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Photographing with the macro technique
Levon used his professional lighting skills from commercial shooting and adapted a traditional macro technique to create a photographic process that revealed hidden details of the insects in a resolution never seen before. The photographer implements a variety of macro photography ideas to show his subject in a new light. He divided every insect into 30 sections and photographed each part separately. For the final picture, all sections were combined leading to each portrait consisting of somewhere between 8,000 to 10,000 separate images.
Also, check out the Complete Macro Photography Guide by Pixpa.
The Microsculpture Exhibition
Insects from the collections of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History have made up the unique collection. The exhibition consists of three-meter prints which allow the audience to study the normally invisible beauty of the small creatures.
