In this very dark hour, I have chosen not to dwell on the difficulty of the moment – because in the end I am still the luckiest guy on Earth – but rather to concentrate on things that inspire me. Well, I just found one.

I have never been too impressed by macro photography and usually find bugs creepy. I know a cat who eats them. But there are people who photograph them, with various degrees of success. The following has made me rethink everything I thought I knew about macro photography and reevaluate the definition of "impossible". In order not to steal the guy’s images, I’m linking below to 4 pages of his gallery with frantic enthusiasm and I hope you will take the time to browse, either through my selections or his.

If I ever caught a glimpse of photographic genius, this is one. I can only dream of some day managing to get results that would be a tenth as amazing as these. From what I gather, he shoots at dawn in the fall and uses bellows and either an enlarger lens or a standard 50mm lens that he doesn’t even reverse. I hear that people also get good results with the Canon MP-E 65mm Macro lens, but that’s out of my league. And then, where does one buy a few ounces of genius?

Here’s the work of Martin Amm from Germany. Kudos.