THE IMAGE

ROUND-LEAVED SUNDEW LAKE DISTRICT NATIONAL PARK

On one particularly wet July day in the Lake District, I embarked on a macro mission. I avoided the hills to seek out small subjects in a boggy area carpeted in sphagnum moss. It can be hard to visualise how a macro image might appear when you’re towering over your subjects, so I put on my waterproof trousers and got down for a closer look. I nearly missed this round-leaved sundew, which stood just a couple of centimetres high.

LETHAL LEAVES

This is one of Britain’s botanical wonders. Its bright colours and bizarre form make it look positively exotic, but it is the plant’s carnivorous tendencies that really capture the attention. Growing in boggy, nutrient-poor habitats, this little plant supplements its diet with insects. Its leaves are covered in glandular hairs, each tipped with globules of sticky mucilage. Victims either blunder into the trap or, lured by the sweet smell of the spheres, land among them. Wings and legs quickly adhere to the leaf, which then begins to fold around the prey. Enzymes are secreted to break down the insect’s body, and the resulting nutrient-rich soup is absorbed.

Depth of field is very limited in macro photography, but you can turn this to your advantage by isolating interesting details against an abstract, out-of-focus background. Here I picked out the sticky droplets that are so important to the sundew’s success.

1 LYING LOW

I lay down for this image and rested my hands on the ground to stabilise the camera. I used the camera’s live view to check the critical sharpness of the areas I wanted to focus on. On most cameras, you can zoom in up to x10 on live view to check the focus is spot on. Use your lens in manual focus when doing this.

2 POSITION IS EVERYTHING

I carefully positioned the camera to exclude distracting background elements such as blades of grass. The reds and greens of other sundews a few inches away give the background its colourful appearance. I used f8 to keep the background relatively soft.

3 SEEING THE REDS

At high magnification, depth of field becomes limited. In this composition I have focussed on a plane that includes a number of the sticky red hair tips. The receding, outof-focus tips in the background add depth.

4 GUIDING LINES

The radial array of glandular hairs around the edge of the sundew act as leading lines to guide the eye into the middle of the sundew leaf, which has been placed offcentre, roughly on a third.

5 LIGHT IT UP

I used a macro flash unit (Canon MT 24EX) mounted on the end of the lens to light the subject. The flash has lifted important details out of shadow (cast by the lens that has a short working distance) and allowed the colours to come alive. The flash has also frozen any camera shake and subject movement.