Looking Closely
How a camera I bought for product shots turned into a habit of collecting textures.
I did not plan any of this. That is the honest version, so let me start there.
I bought a Fuji X-M5 for one reason: product shots in my workshop. I had a fixed flow, a setup that worked, and I never really dug into what the camera could do. It was a tool that did a job. I pointed it at things, the things looked good enough, I moved on.
Around the same time, for completely separate reasons, I started getting into fal.ai and ComfyUI. Photo editing, image manipulation, that whole world. It was practical work, not a hobby. Leetty runs operations through fal.ai. I used it in a few client projects too. So I had a camera on one side and a growing pile of AI image tools on the other, and at some point the obvious question showed up: how do I bring photography and AI together?
It was a good question. It just was not a priority. It sat in the back of my head, the way these things do, waiting for a reason.
The reason came from a creek.
Eskişehir, the Porsuk, and the first close look
There is a creek that runs through Eskişehir, the Porsuk. I was photographing the trees and the animals around it, getting closer than I normally would, and something clicked. Not in the camera. In how I was seeing. The bark, the surfaces, the small repeating patterns. I started thinking about texture as a subject in its own right, not as the background of a product shot.
A few visits to the Kocakır Therapy Forest pushed it further. The detail there is relentless if you slow down enough to notice it. I was shooting my materials as close as I could, but it was not really macro. It was just a normal lens pointed hard at small things. There is a limit to that, and I hit it.
So I bought a macro lens.
That changed the whole thing. On one of my Kocakır trips I shot plants, insects, stones, all up close, and the experience of looking that closely genuinely delighted me. This is the part I did not expect. It was not about the photos. It was about the looking. The macro lens did not just magnify the subject, it magnified the attention.
It also tied the two threads together. The texture I was capturing was exactly the kind of raw material those AI tools were hungry for. The camera question and the AI question turned out to be the same question.
The habit takes over
Once you start seeing textures, you cannot stop. That is the only way I can describe what happened next.
I started looking harder at everything. What I ate. The plants I was growing. Whatever was going on in the places I traveled through. And I started collecting. Not objects, textures.
A pepper, up close, is a landscape. I shot the kiwi I was drying. I shot the fruits and vegetables I carry with me to eat on trips. I shot my own bread at the stage where the dough had fermented and gone alive and strange. It kept expanding, one surface at a time.
Then I started building the rest of the setup around the looking. I brought in lights. I got into focus stacking to handle depth, because at macro distances depth of field is brutally shallow and a single frame is never enough. And I finally went back to the camera I had ignored for so long and learned to actually use it.
What had been a fixed, unexamined flow turned into something multilayered. Camera. Macro. Light. Texture. Dramatic effect. Background. Focus stacking. The software on top of all of it. Dozens of materials collected, each one running through a process with a lot of stages, each stage with its own small decisions.
I will get into the details of that process in later posts, the actual how of the light, the stacking, the camera, the software. This is not that post. This is the post about how I got here.
Why this is the start
I am telling you this story because it is the front door to everything I am going to share in this series.
It started as looking. It did not stay there. Once you have a collection of textures you have captured yourself, a question follows you around: what if I could turn these into something I can hold? Not a photo of a surface, but the surface itself, cast into an object.
That question is where the next post picks up, and it sent me down a much messier road than this one. Trying to make my own material, in my kitchen, to capture these textures physically. It broke a lot before it taught me anything.
But all of that starts here, with a camera I bought for the wrong reason and a creek that made me slow down.
Make. Test. Continue.
This is the first post in a series about turning textures into objects. Subscribe to follow the rest. The next one is about trying to make a material from scratch, and everything that went wrong first.