A photographic tale

Artef Fierel and the Meadow of Little Wonders

A journey through Alice, insects and macro photography

“Wonder does not begin when the world grows larger,
but when we stop thinking of what lies before us as small.”

That evening, Artef Fierel sat beside the window with a book resting on his knees.

It was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Outside, the city he had photographed in black and white was slowly fading. Windows became increasingly blurred rectangles of light, while rooftops sank into shadow and the last colours of the sky withdrew behind the concrete of the buildings.

Artef began to read. He was tired, but the book filled him with calm and gently accompanied him towards the world of dreams.

Alice was sitting beside her sister when she saw a White Rabbit pass by with a watch in his waistcoat pocket. She followed him, fell down his rabbit hole and plunged into a world where size, language and time no longer obeyed their usual rules.

Artef paused.

He took out his notebook and wrote:

“Every photograph begins by following something that others have failed to notice.”

The White Rabbit could be an animal caught crossing the frame. His watch was a reminder that every photograph depends on a precise interval of time: a second, a hundredth, a thousandth.

Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, meanwhile, could become a long corridor of perspective. The shelves, doors and objects encountered during the descent might be photographed with a long exposure, allowing movement to turn into streaks and trails.

Then there were the little bottle labelled “Drink Me” and the cake marked “Eat Me”. Alice became first tiny and then, little by little, enormous.

Photography, too, could alter dimensions.

A small object brought close to the lens could fill the entire image. A drop of water could become a lake. The edge of a leaf could resemble a mountain. An insect’s eye could take on the appearance of a mosaic of regular hexagons.

Artef read on. He met the Caterpillar sitting on the mushroom, wreathed in smoke and questions. He imagined photographing him from below, against the sky, like a mysterious silhouette. Then he thought of his transformation: egg, larva, chrysalis and, at last, butterfly.

One creature, many forms.

The grin of the Cheshire Cat, lingering in the air after the body had vanished, made him think of a backlit photograph. Sometimes light erases detail and leaves only a luminous edge, an outline or a reflection.

The Mad Hatter’s tea party suggested a long exposure: cups motionless on the table and blurred figures moving all around them, as though time belonged to objects rather than people. The Queen of Hearts, with her army of cards, might instead become a geometric composition of reds, blacks, rectangles, diagonals and repetitions: an orderly photograph within a world of paradoxes.

“Alice changes size to enter Wonderland. The photographer changes distance to enter the shape of an idea.”

He continued reading until the letters began to blur. The room was warm. A cooler draught entered through the window and barely stirred the pages, turning them into a soft image that gradually overlapped the Caterpillar’s.

Artef closed his eyes for only a moment.

When he opened them again, he was no longer sitting beside the window.

· · ·

He was lying in a mountain meadow. The grass almost reached his knees. Around him rose gigantic stems, serrated leaves and flowers that looked like trees laden with colour. Farther away, mountains enclosed the horizon with blue peaks and rock faces lit by the gentle late-summer sun.

In his hand were the small two-megapixel camera, his notebook and a magnifying glass with a mahogany-coloured wooden handle.

Artef sat up. He did not know whether he had become small like Alice or whether the meadow itself had grown immense.

A grasshopper leapt in front of him and landed on a leaf. It was green, with long hind legs folded like springs. Its antennae tested the air, sensing its warmth and humidity. Its eye resembled a tiny drop of dark glass.

— You’re late — said the grasshopper.

— Late for what?

— To photograph me before I jump.

With a sharp flick of its legs, the grasshopper disappeared and reappeared on a more distant stem, illuminated by a narrow ray of light filtering through the leaves of the tree.

Artef picked up the camera. It was an old compact model with a modest resolution compared with modern cameras, but enough to remind him that the number of pixels does not, by itself, determine the value of a photograph.

He carefully fixed the magnifying glass in front of the lens. It behaved like an additional optical element: it allowed the camera to focus at a shorter distance and enlarged the subject on the sensor. But getting so close created a difficulty.

At such a short focusing distance, as magnification increased, the depth of field narrowed to a band only a few millimetres deep.

Artef focused on the grasshopper’s eye. Its hind legs were already blurred. He moved the camera by a few millimetres, and the eye slipped out of focus. In close-up photography, he realised, that tiny shift could separate what appeared sharp from what dissolved.

He selected a smaller aperture. At f/8 he would gain greater depth of field, but less light would enter. He would therefore have to lengthen the exposure or increase the sensitivity, at the risk of producing noise in the small image generated by his old camera.

The grasshopper bent its legs. Artef anticipated the leap. He chose a fast shutter speed, about one thousandth of a second, sacrificing some depth of field in order to freeze the movement.

He pressed the shutter.

In the image, the grasshopper was suspended between two blades of grass. Its outstretched legs formed a perfect geometry, while the meadow behind it had become an indistinct green expanse.

— You stopped me — said the grasshopper as it landed.

— Only in the picture.

— That is already a rather strange way to treat time.

And it leapt away.

· · ·

Artef continued walking among the stems. Every step carried him deeper into the meadow, just as each corridor had carried Alice farther into her dream.

He saw a leaf lit from behind. The sun, filtering through its thinnest tissues, kindled its green with an almost transparent light and revealed the intricate network of veins. The leaf no longer appeared to be a simple plant surface, but a map viewed from above. The main veins stretched like great roads or rivers crossing a territory; finer secondary veins branched from them like paths, tributaries and channels. Around them, the tiny areas enclosed within the mesh evoked fields, islands and strips of land divided by water. Towards the edges, where the lines separated into ever finer branches, the design resembled a delta or an estuary, with waterways slowly dispersing before reaching the sea. Within that fragile natural architecture, an entire landscape seemed to be enclosed: silent, boundless and held within the space of a single leaf.

To obtain the correct exposure in backlight, he had to decide what to preserve. If he metered for the sky, the leaf would become a dark silhouette. If he exposed for the leaf, the sun risked becoming a completely white area.

He moved slowly, searching for the right angle, until the disc of the sun was almost entirely hidden behind a hazel branch, like a small partial eclipse. Obstructed by the wood and filtered through the foliage, the light gathered along the contours of the leaf, drawing a slender golden rim. For an instant, every detail emerged with extraordinary clarity: even the normally imperceptible hairs became visible, shining like filaments of glass. The irregular edge of the leaf also lit up, turning into a delicate luminous crown. Seen against the sun, the leaf appeared suspended in space, fragile and translucent, surrounded by a glow that gave it an almost unreal quality.

He took the photograph.

Immediately afterwards, a gust swept across the landscape and set everything in motion. But the wind in the meadow did not travel in a straight line: it descended from the mountainsides, broke against the rocks and divided to flow around them, slipping through cracks and over rough ground. Then it ran low through the grass, bending the stems in successive waves, before rising once more towards the sky. As it passed, it gathered and carried the damp scent of earth, weightless fragments of pollen and microscopic clay-coloured seeds, scattering them far away like minute traces of the landscape. The meadow made that invisible path visible: it bent, trembled and rose again, following the shifting breath of the air.

With a fast shutter speed, Artef could freeze the action of the wind, holding every blade of grass in the midst of its movement. With a longer exposure, however, the swaying meadow would become a fluid brushstroke, leaving on the image the visible trace of the air passing through it. He decided to try both possibilities.

In the first photograph, the meadow appeared perfectly still, suspended in a single instant: every stem was sharp and distinct from the others, as though the wind had suddenly stopped. In the second, the blades of grass lost their precise form and became long green trails, all leaning in the same direction. Their movement composed a vibrant abstract image with a strongly painterly quality, in which the wind, though invisible, finally seemed to assume a form.

The same scene told two different versions of time.

“Exposure time does not merely measure light. It decides what shape movement will take.”

A butterfly passed over his head. Its orange wings, crossed by fine black lines and dotted with small pale markings, opened and closed in rapid tremors. Its flight seemed to follow no precise trajectory: it rose suddenly, descended until it almost brushed the grass, changed direction and surrendered to the wind for a few moments before returning to the flowers.

At times, a smaller butterfly joined it. The two would accelerate and begin circling one another in a delicate dance. They traced spirals, ellipses and broad irregular circles in the air, expanding and contracting with the unpredictable rhythm of the currents. They seemed tied by an invisible thread: they approached until they almost touched, then separated abruptly, only to meet again moments later above a violet flower.

Artef followed the butterfly to that violet corolla. It placed its feet upon the petals and extended its proboscis, a slender coiled structure that unfurled to reach the nectar.

— You must hurry — it said.

— Do you have a watch too?

— I am a clock.

The butterfly slowly closed its wings. It told him that it had been born from an egg laid on a suitable plant. From that egg a larva had emerged, spending much of its early life eating and growing, shedding its cuticle several times. Then it had enclosed itself within a chrysalis.

There, its body had reorganised itself.

At last it had emerged with soft, folded wings, expanded them by pumping haemolymph through their veins and waited until they were strong enough for flight.

— So you were the Caterpillar — said Artef.

— I was a larva.

— And now you are the Butterfly.

— Now I am this form. That does not mean the others have vanished.

Artef raised the camera. To photograph the butterfly in profile, he focused on its eye. In macro photography, that was often the decisive point: if the eye appeared sharp, the viewer could accept that other parts of the body were blurred.

He chose an intermediate aperture. Closing the diaphragm too far would increase the depth of field, but on the small camera it might reduce sharpness through diffraction. Opening it too wide, on the other hand, would turn almost the entire butterfly into indistinct colour.

He waited until the wings were parallel to the sensor. In this way, more of the butterfly would lie on the same plane of focus. It remained still.

Artef pressed the shutter.

· · ·

Then a shadow crossed the flower. A wasp approached with a buzz. Its yellow-and-black body shone in the sun. It landed on the neighbouring corolla and began to explore it.

Artef slowly stepped back.

— Not all wasps want to sting — said the butterfly. — Many seek nectar, hunt other small animals or gather material for their nests. But it is best not to squeeze them between your fingers to find out.

The wasp paused for a moment and, with a quick, precise gesture, cleaned its antennae with its forelegs. Minute grains of pollen clung to its body, caught among the fine hairs during its visit to the flowers. When the insect resumed its flight, that imperceptible dust travelled with it, passing from corolla to corolla and quietly contributing to the reproduction of the meadow plants.

Seen from below and against the light, the pollen acquired an almost luminous quality. Lifted by passing insects and gentle air currents, it floated above the grass like the finest golden dust. Individual grains flared for an instant as they crossed the sun’s rays, then disappeared once more into shadow, like tiny sparks suspended in the air.

But it was not mere dust.

It was part of the plants’ reproductive journey. The wind carried vast quantities without choosing a destination; insects, on the other hand, transported it along routes traced by their search for nectar.

Artef tried to photograph the wasp in flight. The movement of its wings was too fast. With a long exposure they became translucent, almost invisible. A very short exposure could freeze them, but there was not enough light.

He waited for the wasp to enter a patch illuminated by the sun. He selected the fastest available shutter speed and followed its flight with the camera, trying to keep it in the centre of the frame.

He took the photograph.

The image was not perfectly sharp. The body was recognisable, while the wings retained a slight trace of movement. Artef decided it was right that way.

A completely frozen wing would have revealed its structure.

A slightly blurred wing revealed flight.

A little farther on, he encountered a spider, motionless at the centre of the web it had stretched between two slender twigs. The strands were almost invisible, but the sun’s oblique rays brought them forth one by one, revealing a delicate, irregular weave. Tiny drops of dew had become caught there during the night and now trembled gently with every breath of wind.

Pierced by the light, the droplets gleamed with transparent reflections and transformed the web into a necklace of pearls suspended above the meadow. Some had gathered along the main threads; others appeared scattered without order, like tiny crystals abandoned in the air. The web swayed almost imperceptibly, fragile and luminous, while the spider waited at the centre of that precious, unstable geometry.

The spider remained at the centre, listening.

— Are you the Cheshire Cat? — Artef asked.

— Why should I be?

— Because I could hardly see you. First your web appeared, then your legs, and finally your body.

— It is a good way to exist — replied the spider. — Revealing oneself one piece at a time.

Artef brought the magnifying glass close to the lens. He focused first on the front legs, then on the eyes. The spider possessed several, arranged according to the characteristic structure of its group, but they did not all perform the same function. Some helped it perceive movement; others provided more precise vision.

The web, however, was also an organ of perception. Every vibration travelled along the strands and reached the spider. The world arrived not only as light, but as tension and movement.

Artef closed the aperture to keep a wider portion of the web sharp. As the exposure time became too long, he rested the camera on a stone. He had no tripod, but photography had taught him that any stable support could become one.

He activated the self-timer so that the pressure of his finger would not cause vibrations. The camera fired.

At that moment, a small fly struck the web. The spider ran towards the vibration. Artef lowered the camera. He could have photographed the capture, but he understood that the meadow was not arranging a spectacle for him.

The insects went on living even when they were outside the frame.

The butterfly searched for food and plants on which to lay its eggs. The grasshopper ate, escaped predators and sought a mate. The spider maintained its web and responded to vibrations. The wasps built nests, fed their larvae, visited flowers or hunted.

Photography could observe those lives. It should not interrupt them.

· · ·

Artef resumed his journey and came to a circular clearing. At its centre stood a large white flower. Beneath its corolla, motionless like a queen upon her throne, was a praying mantis.

Its forelegs were raised and folded. Its triangular head turned slowly towards him.

— At last — said the mantis.

— Were you waiting for me?

— No. But anyone who waits long enough will always see someone arrive.

Around her, several leaves rose into the air like playing cards. The wind arranged them in ranks, marched them across the clearing and then cast them to the ground. The mantis followed their movement with her head.

— In the Queen of Hearts’ kingdom — said Artef — they would have painted the white flowers red.

— Here, flowers obey no queens. They obey light, water, soil and the seasons.

A fly landed close to the mantis. Her attack was so fast that Artef barely glimpsed it. The camera, however, might have captured it.

He selected a fast shutter speed, focused on the point at which the mantis seemed to be looking and waited. In macro photography, focusing during a sudden movement was often impossible. It was better to anticipate where the action would occur, prepare the composition and allow the subject to enter it.

Another insect approached. Artef held his breath. The mantis struck forward. The camera fired with her.

For an instant, time divided.

For the mantis, it was the decisive moment of the hunt: the instant when stillness broke and her body shot forwards with lightning precision. For the prey, it was the last desperate change of direction, an attempt to escape interrupted before it could even be completed. For Artef, watching through the lens, everything happened in a fraction of a second, in the tiny space between intuition and the shutter. When he checked the image, he saw that only the mantis’s head and forelegs were perfectly sharp. Everything else dissolved into a soft background.

That blur was not a mistake.

It separated the subject from the chaos of the meadow. It removed detail, just as black and white had removed the city’s colours. A shallow depth of field did not show everything, but indicated where to look.

“Depth of field is the measure of our choice. Whenever something becomes sharp, something else consents to disappear.”

The sun began its slow descent towards the horizon, lengthening the shadows across the grass and bathing the meadow in warmer light. Yet, in that small universe, time did not pass in the same way for every creature: each perceived and measured it according to the rhythm of its own existence.

For the butterfly, a single day represented a precious and unrepeatable part of adult life, marked by flights, the search for flowers and fleeting encounters above the meadow. For the larva, however, time advanced slowly and was counted in moults, bodily growth and leaves consumed one after another. For the spider, it revealed itself in the vibrations of the web: brief tremors announcing the wind, a passing insect or the arrival of possible prey.

For the grasshopper, time was made of silent intervals between one leap and the next. For the flower, it coincided with the patient rhythm of the corolla opening and closing, guided by light and darkness. For pollen, at last, time took the form of an uncertain journey entrusted to the wind or to the unwitting flight of an insect.

Thus, different kinds of time coexisted in the same meadow: some as quick as a wingbeat, others as slow as the growth of a stem. The sun passed through them all without distinction, silently continuing its journey across the sky.

Artef looked at his camera. It, too, possessed its own idea of time. It could divide time into minute fractions or gather it into a single exposure. It could show what the eye could not separate, or unite movements that the eye had observed one after another.

The wind rose again, and the meadow began to surge like an increasingly restless sea. Sudden gusts swept through the grass, lifting the stems into broad green waves that chased one another to the edge of the field. What was merely a change in the weather for Artef became a true calamity for the meadow’s smallest creatures.

The insects sought shelter beneath leaves, among closed petals and inside narrow cracks in the earth. So small and light, they could be carried away by a single gust or hurled against a stem in one moment of inattention. The wasps flew lower and advanced with difficulty close to the grass, where the currents were less violent. The butterfly settled on the sheltered side of a leaf and closed its wings, trying to merge with the vegetation. Around it, every creature remained motionless and hidden, waiting for that invisible storm to end and for the meadow to recover its calm.

Artef lay down in the grass. He no longer searched for photographs. He felt the warmth of the ground, the passage of the air and the rustle of the leaves. He watched an ant climb onto the sleeve of his jacket. He did not brush it away. He allowed it to explore the fabric, pause beside a button and continue on its way.

For the first time, he did not feel like a visitor.

His shadow offered relief to a small portion of the meadow, withdrawing it for a while from the direct sunlight, while his body sheltered it from the wind. Beneath his weight, the most fragile stems bent towards the ground. The insects had to interrupt their journeys, change direction or seek another passage.

Artef’s mere presence changed what surrounded him: it altered the light, lowered the temperature of the ground and transformed the paths of the tiny creatures living among the grass. Even when he remained still, he produced consequences. His warmth passed into the earth, and every gesture caused a change, however small.

Until then, he had believed he was observing the landscape from outside, as if the camera could separate him from what happened before the lens. Now he understood that this distance was only an illusion. He was neither outside the landscape nor an invisible witness to it. His shadow, his weight and his breath had become part of that system of relationships.

Artef was not simply in the meadow. He had become one of its conditions.

The mantis hunted, the spider listened to the vibrations of its web, the grasshopper leapt among the stems and the butterfly carried pollen from flower to flower. The wind scattered seeds, while the sun passed through the leaves. Artef observed, but his gaze did not separate him from the landscape: he, too, belonged to the same web of connections.

The spider’s web was not the meadow’s only web. Everything was connected.

Light was bound to plants. Plants to insects. Insects to predators. Pollen to the wind. The wind to the mountains. The mountains to the clouds. And everything to time, which did not flow like a straight river, but assumed the shape of the life passing through it.

Artef opened his notebook for one final note:

“I thought I had come to magnify small things. Instead, I discovered that they were the ones widening my gaze.”

A stronger gust lifted the pages. The meadow, the insects and the mountains distorted like reflections upon rippled water. Then the landscape vanished, and the sun became the glowing circle of the lamp beside the window.

Artef awoke in the armchair.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was still open on his knees. On the table rested the two-megapixel camera and the magnifying glass.

For a few moments, he thought he had dreamt everything. Then he looked at the camera screen. There were the grasshopper suspended in mid-leap, the butterfly on the violet flower, the backlit leaf, the web covered in dew, the wasp’s blurred wings and the mantis’s motionless eyes.

The final photograph showed only a meadow at sunset. There was no obvious subject. Yet when Artef enlarged the image, he recognised hundreds of presences: blades of grass, seeds, tiny insects, fragments of pollen and an almost invisible spider’s web. All the creatures continued their lives, unaware that they had been photographed.

Artef smiled.

He had followed Alice, thinking he was entering an imaginary world. Now he understood that Wonderland did not necessarily lie at the bottom of a rabbit hole.

Sometimes it was enough to kneel in a meadow, bring a lens close and learn to look from the right distance.

Because wonder does not begin when the world grows larger.
It begins when we stop thinking of what lies before us as small.