Macro Photography, Microscopic Details

WHEN Riva Berkovitz moved close to Griggs Park in Brookline, Mass., its beauty inspired her to take up photography.

�I needed to capture it but I realized I couldn�t paint it,� Ms. Berkovitz said. �So I decided to buy a digital camera.�

Ms. Berkovitz assumed she would use the camera for landscapes. But she ended up concentrating on the minute rather than the sweeping: close-ups of the fine details of flowers. She recently bought an Olympus digital single-lens reflex camera and a special close-up, or macro, lens.

�If it were not for a digital camera and a computer, I would not be a photographer,� said Ms. Berkovitz, who recently turned 79.

Close-up photography, of course, long predates the rise of the digital camera. But digital photography, along with the introduction of electronic light metering in cameras, has overcome many of the exposure and framing problems that previously made it something of a chore. And digital cameras also offer the ability to quickly review close-up photos � useful in a branch of photography where slight focus errors or exposure mishaps can turn a thing of beauty into an unsightly blob.

While the rest of the world uses the word �macro� to indicate large scale, as in macroeconomics, in photography it describes close-up work. One theory on this quirk of language is that at their closest focus settings, most special close-up lenses project an image of their subject on the camera�s sensor or film that is exactly the size of the object itself. (Just to add to the confusion, Nikon calls its close-up lenses �Micro-Nikkors.�)

IAN AUSTEN

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