For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in nature and wildlife. I recall as a five year old boy, I was watching an ant colony. I couldn’t understand how such a small creature could contain all the necessary motors and controls for those six legs.
Later I found out that others thought insects were scary or dirty. So I started to photograph them to show people the beauty that I saw in them.
More than thirtyfive years ago I bought my first Canon single lens reflex camera, a F1, with macro accessories, and a whole new world opened up for me. For years I photographed with home-made flash units, to get more light on my subjects for the required small apertures for maximum depth of field. Even then I dreamt of technical possibilities that are now quite normal, like auto-focus, and automatic flash fill without the manual computations.
I also started pouring over text books to try to identify the bugs I photographed. I quickly realized that most biologists were more interested in a clear depiction of an organism than a beautiful picture. My background is not biology, but graphic design. Perhaps that is why, for me, the image as a whole is most important. It just has to work, color, composition, form, sharpness, as well as the soft-focus areas and background.
Since the mid-eighties, my work has been published in many magazines and nature books, both in the Netherlands and abroad. My images have been used in advertisements, ranging in size from a postage stamp to posters.
Specialty
As you can see, my specialty is macro photography. Butterflies and insects, but also frogs, lizards, mice, mushrooms, and any of the little folk that inhabit the forest floor. Of course I’ll also photograph other animals, birds and landscapes if the opportunity presents itself, but my camera is usually set up for shooting much smaller things.
Aloha, Frans