My project “Microcosmic Portraits Of The Little Earthlings” holds a special place in my life. This project is a series of macro portraits of insects taken with two retro manual focus lenses, manufactured in 1982, connected by a filter ring adapter.
Each image was made by the focus stacking of a few tens or hundreds of shots. The purpose of this project was to show common insects from an unexpected perspective. That is why all insects were from my native South Ural, the place no one would expect to find exotic, bright species. A photo of a dead fly, found on the kitchen floor in 2017, triggered the project. Now the project serves the benefits of the humanity by disseminating visual knowledge of small creatures in Open Access. My photos illustrate articles on Wikipedia. Any person can access the photos for free anytime to peruse marvels of insects’ morphology and habitats. I am happy to contribute to the global knowledge and to open people’s minds with my provocative photographic works. I will continue to donate my photos to the Wikipedia project for educational, scientific and research purposes. Only 0.022% of 64 million photos and images from the Wikipedia library are featured as the best works. I am proud that my photo “Portrait of an ant” is one of the featured works.
About Irina Petrova
I am Irina Petrova, an internationally published and award-winning photographer and artist from Russia. I specialize in wildlife micro-photography, and science fictionand living technologies inspired installations. My installations organically integrateliving and artificial entities. My unique feature is that I use only low-cost retro manual focus lenses to manifest wonders of everyday life. Some of my retro lenses cost as low as $7.This is because I believe the photographer is key not the equipment.
I have won a substantial number of awards and prizes, including the title ND Nature Discovery of the Year 2019 and MIFA 2020 awards, the Gold of Le Prix de la Photographie de Paris (PX3) in Nature/Other, winning titles at the 3rd Chania International Photo Festival 2020, FAPA 2020 in Wildlife, IPA 2019, TIFA 2019, SONY European photo contest “Bugs”, Chromatic Awards in Wildlife and Animals, FotoRoomOPEN | ACN edition for women photographers in the Single Images category. I am a member of the International Federation of New Media, the National Association of Professionals of the Photo industry, the Russian Union of Wildlife Photographers, and an affiliated artist at the Unconventional Computing Lab (Bristol, UK). My photographic works are frequently exhibited in leading galleries in Italy, UK, Russia, Greece. [Official Website]
