The beauty of macro photography is being able to get so close to your subject that you see details you had never noticed before. New colors, new textures or maybe even previously unseen wounds. To zoom in is to notice but it also says there is something worth noticing. What if we spent that much time paying attention? What might we see?

When I took this picture, I hadn’t really paid attention to the number of condos on the other shore. After zooming in and counting I realized there may be 300 people or more in this picture. It’s one street in a fairly wealthy area. Each of those people in each of those homes in each of the condos on that street have so much diversity of need. Unlike the first picture, we see large numbers of people in singular ways because there is too much to pay attention to. What are the challenges of seeing people as blocks of people? What do we lose when we do this? What might we miss?