October 2023 General Meeting: Jason Hollinger, Macrophotography in the Field

Join us online for our next General Meeting, Wednesday, October 4th, 7:00pm. This will be an ONLINE ONLY meeting.

Our speaker Jason Hollinger, will be sharing his methods for macrophotography in the field.

This presentation will be an informal discussion of the challenges of applying modern stacked photography techniques to fieldwork, with a particular bias toward the problems specific to lichens. The goal is to capture lichens in situ, as they look in their natural context, showing their typical forms that a field-guide reader will experience on a walk in the woods, while at the same time trying to bring their photographs to life with good lighting, color, texture, appropriate depth of field, bokeh and all the rest. All the while dealing with subjects that are sometimes just a few millimeters in size. And which often grow on twigs, up on cliffs, in swamps and in other challenging places. Jason will share a selection of photos from the last couple of years, both his successes -- and more often his failures! -- let's see what we can learn!

Jason Hollinger is an amateur lichenologist based in the Great Smoky Mountains of NC. For many years he was content with carrying a small, easy-to-use, point-and-shoot camera that he could fit in his pocket. This encouraged him to take scads of photos of anything and everything, allowing him to get as experimental and creative as he liked, on the principle that just by shear, dumb luck he was bound to get some good photos from time to time. But when approached by the lichenologist at New York Botanical Garden to basically update the famous volume Lichens of North America (by Brodo, Sharnoff & Sharnoff) which was renowned for setting the standard of gorgeous macro photography of lichens for the last two decades, he finally took the challenge to up his game to the next level.

https://bornnaturalist.org/club/gallery.html

You can also visit Tim Wheeler's gallery.  He pioneered stacked lichen macrophotography, and he's helped Jason through a number of technical problems.

https://timwheelerphotography.com/