About
I'm Gemma. I photograph wildlife in South Yorkshire, mostly in my own garden, mostly things small enough to sit on your fingernail.
People always ask how I got into macro. Honestly? I just started looking closer.
The world that exists in a few square centimetres is extraordinary, and most people walk straight past it every single day. Once you've seen a hoverfly's eyes properly, or watched a bee groom pollen off its own face, it's quite hard to go back to not noticing.
I've been photographing professionally for years — I run a branding and content studio, and I build websites when it's raining. But this is the bit I'd do for nothing.
Almost everything on this site was shot within about thirty metres of my back door.
It's a Victorian walled garden, 130 years old, with a stone bridge, a gas lamp, an ivy-covered outbuilding and a pond that came with the house. We were told it "sometimes gets ducks". It gets ducks.
There's also a great spotted woodpecker who turns up several times a day for peanuts, ring-necked parakeets who make an unholy racket, tawny owls after dark, and a sparrowhawk who ruins everyone's afternoon. The flowers are grown deliberately for pollinators, which is why there's so much to point a lens at.
In April I raised a duckling.
She was called Bloom, she was rehabilitated and released, and a drake still comes to the pond who responds instantly when I shake a food tub — the same conditioned behaviour her parents had. Every other mallard hides or flies off. He doesn't.
I have no way of proving it's him. I've decided it is.
I just started looking closer. That's the whole trick.