---Practical Close-up photography----	Kon Sasaki
	(Close-Up Technique 1)

It was not until "color of science" (1963) and "Sajiki(folklore) of science" (1964) published in color on a Bungei-shunjyu magazine. This became my starting point to announce my close-up photography and microscopic photography. Until then, I used to work on studio photographs and media photographs. My main goal was to be a media photographer. But one day, by suggestion of Mr. Ihei Kimura, I started helping with still photographs at Tokyo Cinema, one of the world's known scientific movie companies. At that company, they were mainly making films of "the life series". And when I got in, they were working on a "life born" series in "the life series", which was taking a picture of a chicken until it was born. Sometimes, they had rushes(test taking) of a short part of the movie, and I watched as much as I could because it was interesting. Most of the cuts where views from a microscope, making them extremely high close-ups of up to a few hundred magnitude that it was very difficult even for me to understand without a complicated explanation. But I was hit by the big drama of the birth of life, that I though very often whether there was a way that I could make a film that anyone could understand and enjoy.

Back in 1966, there weren't as many convenient tools as they are now. I used to be creative and try many approaches to my goal, either by making them, or using other things, or by making changes to the machines that I already had. Many of my works today could not be possible without my creative thinking. After all, there was creativity because I had a picture that I wanted to take, and those times when I twisted my head to get what I wanted was also very fun The right picture shows a Lyca R3 with a motor, and a Lyca type 2 bellows. The 2 rings in front of that are home made, and the lens in front is a Minolta's 80mm lens for blow-ups. It's a combination with a minimum aperture is F45. There are so many things I did with cameras and other machinery, I will just leave out the rest.

There are many ways, as well as (little techniques at that moment), so I will explain using examples of indoor and outdoor photographing. The left picture shows an indoor set, the left side is the camera. The center is the subject, which is a flower, and the right side is the background paper. It's important to you're your hands free (right photo) at all times so that you can handle the focus and the shutter when the chance arrives. The strobe should be put flexibly, but to keep the strobe angles so that you can take pictures of small animals with quick movements. This is true not only indoors, but also outside as well.

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Photo and text: copyright (c) KON SASAKI.　All rights reserved.