Some of the finest quality print jobs in the world are currency bills. Canada recently created a new line of some of their bills, and I must say that I’m impressed with what their designers have created. Like many things, the beauty is all in the details.

I shot several photos of very small portions of $50 and $100 bills, looking for abstract compositions. The photos were all done with one fixed magnification, a window into the close-up world that is about 6mm x 9mm in size.

These photographs represent only a very small percentage of the area of the bills. The small black rectangles on the black-and-white $50 bill above show you the area of each photo.

If you mouse over the photo of the hologram below, or swipe on an iPad or smartphone, you’ll see a burst of changing colours. (It may take a moment to load the first time– and please let me know if this does not work correctly on your device. Does not work in Internet Explorer, but can be viewed in a modern browser: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera.)

Mouseover or swipe this photo, left to right, and closely watch the details in the colour shifts:

This project was done in the spirit of exploration, of finding abstract fragments within a greater whole, and of looking very closely at details. This is why I became hooked on macro photography in the first place.