Staged macro portraits Humanise bugs
Student photographer Sol Warsop reveals how he set up these charming shots showing the secret life of snails
Creating elaborate setups – often cobbled together from tinfoil and lots of masking tape – and tinkering with everything to
perfect my shots makes me happy. I’m also fascinated by the world of detail that you can reveal with macro photography.
In these anthropomorphised macro portraits, I aimed to give a different perspective on the life of snails by intertwining their lives with ours. I was inspired in part by David LaChapelle’s image ‘Gas Chevron’, where a frog is staring at a miniature petrol station that appears to have been constructed in the undergrowth. I loved how alien the scene looked, so I reversed his concept to show animals enjoying the comforts of human life – indulging in a decadent picnic, strategising over a chess match, or curling up on a comfy chair in front of a campfire – in their natural habitat.
I knew I’d need to control every aspect of these images so I set up the scenes in the studio, thinking very carefully about the angle of my light to try to imitate natural outdoor lighting. I sat the snails on furniture from a doll’s house and coaxed them into position with fruit snacks. Placing my camera on a tripod allowed me to combine multiple exposures later to get each snail looking exactly how I wanted, as they never behaved themselves at the same time. This technique helped me to create the illusion that the snails were facing each other as humans would while enjoying their game or sharing a meal, or were facing the fire as we do.
To create the illusion of the fire, I buried a small bike light covered in orange tissue paper in the grass and placed wood chips around it. This provided the warm glow that would come from a real fire, lighting up the snail’s face. Finally I used Photoshop’s flame generator to paint in the flames along paths I had drawn.
After setting the scenes up, I shot these snail macro portraits on a Canon EOS 80D with a Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. The chess match and picnic shots were taken at 1/125 sec, f/6.3 and ISO 1,000, while the fireside shot used the settings of 1/60 sec, f/2.8 and ISO 2,000.