CLOSE-UPS
The results of the CUPOTY CHALLENGE, Minimal, are in! The winner and a selection of finalists share their tips and techniques with competition co-founder Tracy Calder
Reducing a sauce takes time: you have to prepare the ingredients, heat the liquid and wait for the water to evaporate before you can add your seasoning. Your patience, however, will be rewarded with a concentrated liquor that’s full of flavour and character. It takes confidence to reduce something to what’s essential, and you have to trust that this stripping back will result in something full-bodied. In art, you can see this confident stripping back in the work of painters such as Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian and Robert Ryman. In photography you can see it in work by Michael Kenna, Fan Ho and Hiroshi Sugimoto, among others. If you study the oeuvre of these artists, you’ll see that nothing is included by chance – everything in the frame adds to the story.
In search of this special liquor, for the latest CUPOTY CHALLENGE (in association with Affinity Photo 2) we asked photographers for work that fits the description ‘Minimal’. Essentially, we were looking for clean, uncluttered images with minimal elements and/or harmonious colours. What we got was so much more. Everything from stink bugs to springtails and plant seeds were put before the judges – each picture a beautiful example of how simplifying a scene can amplify its message.
Congratulations to Ferenc Kocsis for taking the top spot with his shot of a Danube mayfly. If you would like to stay up to date with the latest CUPOTY news, including details of this year’s main competition, see www.cupoty.com. And to see the shortlisted entries for the CUPOTY Challenge: Minimal, see www.cupoty.com/minimal.
Finalist Benjamin Salb Details of a Rough Stink Bug
Nationality: American
Occupation: IT manager
Website: www.benssmallworld.com, Instagram: @bens_small_world
‘I love finding hidden details within ordinary macro subjects and this rough stink bug was no exception. I encountered it while on a 4am macro hunt last autumn. It was a chilly morning and the few subjects I did find didn’t move that much, if at all. As a result, I was able to position the stick that the stink bug was sitting on in the air to isolate it from the background and show off its complex details. The image was captured as a handheld focus bracket of 17 frames (combined in Helicon Focus).’
TOP TIPS
1 Chilly mornings are great for finding still macro subjects. If you’re a consistent afternoon macro photographer, try changing it up!
2 When trying to capture a subject fr
