Julian Köpke

I immediately thought this ripe strawberry with its intense colour, which looks like a hand or a baby’s foot, was suitable for being photographed against a dark background. All other tasks were quickly cancelled.

With my IQ4 back on the Phase One, the size of the image exceeds the size of the fruit, so the image fits the definition of a macro. It quickly became clear that by adding small details, the message of the image could be influenced.

At first I thought of a first date for which someone would like to present a bouquet of flowers and scoured our garden for small blossoms. I found the smallest specimens with the light blue forget-me-nots right outside the front door.

Flowers in the studio remain living creatures that constantly reorient themselves in the changing light. The following picture is taken at ISO 800 in 30 seconds. The attempt to photograph at ISO 50 with 8 minutes failed due to the movement of a part of the forget-me-not.

To express creativity through a hand, the idea of a painter with brushes in his hand seemed suitable to me. The brushes had to be small, of course. Very small. Fortunately, I found two suitable ones in my wife’s make-up utensils. The metallic finish of the brush hairs created a reflection of the red strawberry in the handle of the brushes.

It takes a lot of luck to find a four-leaf clover. They are very popular as a sign of good luck. My wife is a master at finding them. So much luck makes the hand invisible.

In any case, anyone who encounters a real dinosaur needs luck. But the dinosaur is much bigger than the sensor, so it’s no longer a macro shot.

For me, pareidolia is a source of inspiration or creativity when an image won’t let go of me and I keep searching for an answer or an understanding. With these sweet strawberries, there was a physical pleasure at the end.

Inspired by a photography of german photographer Michael Wesely, I tried to superimpose the movements of orange tulips in a white vase to create an equivalent to a longtime exposure image. A longtime exposure with 3 or 4 days exposure time was unfortunately not possible for me. Therefore I took 35 pictures with my camera at irregular intervals dictated by occupational requirements whose pixels were to be averaged. Here 4 examples of the highly active flowers in a vase:

Each RAW image has a file size of 125 MB, after RAW conversion this was 580 MB per image as TIF. The entire stack had a size of 21,5 GB. The image of the average then becomes 580 MB again. The pure mean value image was interesting to me but not exciting. Therefore I took this image and layered in parts of original images. The result became convincing:

Strawberry pareidolia

Time fusion tulips