I am a photographer and biologist. Born in Southport to parents who loved their garden, I grew up surrounded by beautiful plants and was fascinated by the exquisite colours and detail that can be observed in the natural world, especially when you get in close.
When I was a child, I developed severe short-sightedness. Without corrective lenses, everything more than twenty centimetres away was a blur. I seldom found this to be limiting. Glasses sometimes fog up or are knocked off but that’s about it.
Without my glasses though, the world looked very different. Colours were no problem but, with the lack of focus, detail was lost. They were often simply explosions of disembodied colour. If I wanted to see something clearly, I had to move in very close.
This series of photographs was taken with the lens about twenty centimetres from the subject. I used a ‘normal’ lens - 35mm f1.8 - to catch the normal field of view of the eye. They have not been cropped. The processing in the camera has emphasised the colours in a fashion that roughly mimics my experience. In short, these pictures give an idea of how things looked when I removed my glasses.
And so it was for more than forty years until my cataract surgery also corrected my myopia. My eyesight is much better now, but this world, closely observed, brilliantly coloured, is gone.
These pictures bring it back for me.
Tim Reichelt B.Sc. (Hons.)