Levon Biss

Artist

Levon Biss is a British photographer based in the UK who has been shooting campaigns for international brands for the last 18 years. His work has graced the covers of publications such as TIME Magazine and he has produced a best selling book on the global game of soccer titled ‘One Love’. Levon’s passion for nature and photography have now come together to create Microsculpture, a unique photographic study of insects in mind-blowing magnification. Biss has adapted traditional macro photography techniques to create a photographic process that reveals the minute detail of insects in a resolution never seen before. For his latest personal project, Levon embraced the world of extreme macro photography and has taken the genre to an entirely new level. His photographs capture in breathtaking detail the beauty of the insect world and are printed in large-scale formats to provide the audience with an unforgettable viewing experience. His exhibition 'Microsculpture' took 3 years to create and has been exhibited throughout Europe, the Middle East and U.S. Biss explains his photographic process: “Each image from the Microsculpture project is created from around 8000 individual photographs. The pinned insect is placed on an adapted microscope stage that enables me to have complete control over the positioning of the specimen in front of the lens. I shoot with a 36-megapixel camera that has a 10x microscope objective attached via a bespoke lens tube. I photograph the insect in approximately 30 different sections, depending the size of the specimen. Each section is lit differently with strobe lights to bring out the micro sculptural beauty of that particular section of the body. For example, I will light and shoot just one antennae, then after I have completed this area I will move onto the eye and the lighting set up will change entirely to suit the texture and contours of that specific part area of the body. I continue this process until I have covered the whole surface area of the insect. Due to the inherent shallow depth of field that microscope lenses provide, each individual photograph only contains a tiny slither of focus. To enable me to capture all the information I need to create a fully focused image, the camera is mounted onto an electronic rail that I program to move forward 8 microns between each shot. To give you an idea of how far that is, the average human hair is around 75 microns wide. The camera will then slowly move forward from the front of the insect to the back creating a folder of images that each have a thin plane of focus. Through various photo-stacking processes I flatten these images down to create a single picture that has complete focus throughout the full depth of the insect. I repeat this process over the entire area of the insect and once I have 30 fully focused sections I bring them together in Photoshop to create the final photograph. From start to finish, a final photograph will take around 3 weeks to shoot, process and retouch.” Levon continues to concentrate on the microscopic world and recently shot an 8 month commission for the National Museum of Qatar producing 20 images of local insect species for permanent display in the museum. He has also taken is unique technique to the Bolivian rainforest for a month, shooting a sequence for the recent Netflix natural history documentary 'Our Planet'.

The relationships between photography, creativity and technology.

There is no such thing as being naturally creative, it's simply a way of working and a mode of thinking. It is a powerful tool that can be applied to a multitude of disciplines and situations.

TED speaker 2017, Vancouver TEDx Gateway speaker 2018, Mumbai