A childhood reminescence: While exposing his first rollfilm, Krishna Kumar Agrawal opened his box camera after every shot to try and see the picture. The box has meanwhile given place to a Nikkormat EL and a Nikon FE — and naive innocence to expert photographic technique which has already gained Agrawal several photographic prizes.

It was his cacti that got him involved in closeup photography. He wanted to do more than just look at his collection, so he bought a couple of second-hand closeup lenses and taped them to the front of his camera lens. (He has now graduated to a 105 mm MicroNikkor.)

The other concern of this young photographer was lighting. Direct sunlight was too strong for him and the lighting too flat, without modelling. So he combines fill-in light reflected from white walls or sheets with normal skylight or general ambient light. As reflecting surfaces are liable to introduce their surface tint as colour casts, K. K. Agrawal uses white or neutral grey walls. Or he may don white garb or a white apron and become his own fill-in reflector. If the available diffused light is insufficient, Agrawal uses direct sunlight from the side or as backlight and screens off the immediate surroundings of the subject with black cards.

Agrawal establishes the exposure by TTL readings but switches off automatic control when taking the picture, since light entering through the finder eyepiece can cause exposure errors.

To avoid reciprocity failure effects, Agrawal corrects exposure times longer than 1 sec, using a conversion table or film manufacturer’s data (e. g. for Kodachrome 25). eh