I'm Matt Doogue, a photographer from the U.K. I specialise in macro photography, revealing hidden worlds and creatures to my audience, but I enjoy all genres of photography.
I stumbled upon photography through a desperate need to disconnect and escape the pressures of our society and my own mindset. I love to now share my experience and mental health journey with others in the hope I can inspire them.
I have worked with Nat Geo, BBC Earth and Canon and I have various publications to my name.
Photography offers an escape unlike any other. It allows us to capture moments, create moments, and interpret the worlds we see through a lens. We document, we study, we create art, and for me, this was lifesaving.
In my early twenties, I suffered a huge mental breakdown. It was unexpected, out of control, and hard. I attempted to take my own life.
I tried the anti depressant tablets but they didn’t really work for me, I needed something that would occupy my thoughts, something that would take up my time and stop me from over thinking. That’s when I picked up a camera.
When I’m looking through the lens, I enter a hidden world not many see, a world of macroscopic wonder, the world of the arthropods. I’m no longer in our world, a world full of social media comparisons, fake news, war, worry, and stress. That doesn’t exist here. This world is so much more different than ours, it’s a world full of colour, romance, detail, life and wonder, bound by no rules, only mother nature.
Each human in this world is unique. We all have our own unique features, our own ways of life.
We move through life with fluidity, we change, adapt and grow.
Each of these photos consists of high magnification macro photography of bubbles 2mm in size.
Each bubble creates a unique pattern, that can never ever be replicated, just like us! It's a natural generative algorithm which results in various colours and shapes. Each image is completely unique.
Art can be found everywhere, it can be found in nature, it can be found in man-made structures and generated AI programmes and it can be found in each of us.
I hid my true self away from the world for too long, so much so that I now have a passion for revealing the hidden, hidden gems of art and beauty that can't be seen with the human eye.
Each of these art pieces were created using milk, paint, oil, water, dish soap and a paper plate. Two light sources also used to create depth. Some of them look like deep space nebula, you can lose yourself just looking at them, the reality is a scene just 10mm-20mm on a paper plate in my kitchen.
I mixed various ratios together and waited for a scene to materialize, once something appeared that triggered an emotional response within me I took the shot.
A selection of some of my more unusual styles of photography.
Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
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