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"To photograph insects properly, you have to focus on their eyes."
My first encounter with a camera was as a high school student, when my friend showed me his. Wanting one immediately, I bought a single lens reflex model. I was absolutely enthralled at first, and took photos of anything and everything, although at first I was more interested in the mechanism of the camera itself than the actual photographs, which I regarded as being of less importance. Later on at university, where I majored in Japanese history with the aim of becoming a teacher of social studies, the idea of being a photographer was still far from my mind. Nevertheless, I eventually joined a publishing company with the hope of being able to do some photographic work. As it turned out, my job involved nothing but marketing and I was never given any photographic jobs. After seven years I'd had enough and quit the company.
It was then, having just turned 30 with no particular plan in mind, that I decided to set out on my own as a freelance photographer. You could say I was fearless at the time! A friend I'd met while working at the publishing company occasionally introduced me to paying jobs, but I couldn't take really professional photographs, and failure followed failure. At the time, I didn't even know there was such as thing as reversal film, and I was still using flash bulbs when other photographers were already using electronic strobes.
In the early days, I used to take photographs of virtually anything rather than specializing in any one field. Realizing I ought to settle on a specific theme, I decided to focus on close-up photography, an area in which few photographers were involved. This was particularly true of insect photography, so I thought it might be a good idea to give it a try. At the time, I didn't even own a macro lens, so I had to shoot with a close-up lens mounted on a standard lens. After a couple of weeks I showed some of my work to a publisher, and shortly afterwards received a request to take photographs of insects according to their species for use in an illustrated entomology reference book.
I first started shooting ants and then moved on to dragonflies, grasshoppers and various other insects. In addition to the fact that insect photography means working with small subjects, it also requires that you focus on their tiny eyes. For some reason, the unusual techniques involved soon became second nature to me. As for equipment, I needed to take shots with a flash so I bought an OM-2, my very first Olympus camera. I found the combination of ZUIKO lenses and TTL direct flash control perfect for shooting small subjects.
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