Objects in the Camera May Be Smaller Than They Appear
Alex Wild wants to teach you—and everyone else—how to be a bug photographer.
- Alejandro Santillana01Entomologist Alex Wild’s life is full of bugs. When he leaves his house, he notes the growth of two paper wasp nests in his garage. When he strolls across the lawn at the university where he works, he turns over stones searching for ant colonies. And when he opens the door to his lab, he's greeted by a million insects—like this straight-snouted weevil.
- Alejandro Santillana02Wild is the curator of entomology at the University of Texas at Austin. He's also a professional bug photographer, licensing images to publications like National Geographic and The New York Times. And he wants you to be a bug photographer too. Wild runs Insects Unlocked, a program that allows anyone to visit the university's bug collection, pick out a blueberry bee or anything else, and learn how to photograph it.
- christopher johnson03All the photos are posted to the program's Flickr account, where people can download them for free. He hopes it helps people love bugs as much as he does. "They're small, so they don't get the appreciation of larger animals, but they do even more amazing things," says Wild, a self-described “ant guy.” "And they're everywhere\!"
- brett morgan04Wild’s fascination with insects began at four years old, collecting ant nests in Allegheny State Park in New York, near where he grew up. He didn't start photographing them until 2000, when he was an entomology graduate student at University of California at Davis. “I needed photographs for my talks about Argentine ants—horrible little brown things—so I bought a cruddy digicam,” he says. “It was really addictive.”
- Karen Perez05In 2015, when he accepted a job at UT Austin, he knew he had to incorporate photography. He took to Kickstarter, where he was able to raise more than $12,000 to purchase photography equipment.
- christopher johnson06Wild's 1,300-square-foot collection room houses a million bugs sorted by taxonomy, including wasps from entomologist (and sexologist) Al Kinsey and 150-year-old beetles from a school teacher in the 1870s.
- alejandro santillana07The photo lab is just next door, where after a quick demonstration of how to use the equipment, people can get to work. There's a student who uses the collection for a research project on bees and a New Yorker cartoonist who likes to snap photos of butterflies and moths.
- alejandro santillana08Some people like shooting on brightly colored backgrounds while others go for a more serious approach on black or white.
- christopher johnson09For aspiring bug photographers, Wild has a few tips. Work with soft, diffused light to highlight details on your specimen and, most importantly, photograph from the bug's perspective. “If your point is to make people empathize with the insect and how it sees the world, get down on its level, shooting sideways or up at it," he says. Turns out the best way to take a photo of a bug is to think like one.
Charley Locke writes about growing up and growing old for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and WIRED. ... Read More
Writer
Amazing Macrophotography of Insects
We rarely see insects in close up, unless we wake up from a nap outside on a spring day and find one creeping slowly across our eyeball, various proboscii dripping. And even (perhaps especially!) in that circumstance, we don’t appreciate how beautiful insects can be. This gallery has a number of macro-photographs of various insects, […]
John Brownlee
Biggest, Fastest, Bloodiest: Earth's Most Extreme Insects
Find out who in the insect world is the biggest, longest, bloodiest, highest jumper, best actor and more in Wired's Entomological Hall of Fame.
Daniela Hernandez
What Gives With Insects Pretending to Be Sticks and Leaves?
A surprising number of insects look so much like leaves and sticks that it doesn't seem possible.
Matt Simon
Engrossingly Gross Photos of Spiders and Insects Eating Each Other
These are some of the most detailed and disturbing bug-meal photos you might ever see. You can thank us later.
Nadia Drake
Nature Zen: Orchid Bees are SHINY
These flying jewels also have really smelly legs, and pollinate orchids.
Gwen Pearson
Not to Alarm Anyone, but Flesh-Eating Screwworms Have Entered the US
The USDA this week confirmed the first known infection of the carnivorous fly larva, which feast on the flesh of living mammals, after the United States eradicated the nightmare bugs in the 1960s.
Beth Mole, Ars Technica
The US Has a Plan to Combat Screwworm. It Involves a Lot More Flies
Releasing sterilized flies can crash a local population of flesh-eating screwworms. But the US currently has limited capacity to produce them.
Emily Mullin
Why Garlic Repels Mosquitoes and Keeps Them From Breeding
Garlic, as your grandmother may have told you, repels mosquitoes; it also completely blocks them from mating and laying eggs. Diallyl disulfide, it turns out, deserves the credit.
Fernanda González
Old Oil and Gas Wells Could Find Second Life Producing Clean Energy
States across the US are looking to take major sources of pollution and use them to generate much-needed power.
Maria Gallucci
Quantum ‘Jamming’ Could Help Unlock the Mysteries of Causality
To keep communications secure in a post-quantum world, cryptographers are digging down into the concept of cause and effect.
Matt von Hippel
All the Fancy Measuring Devices Used in Science Rely on Two Stone-Age Techniques
The many methods we use to gather data ultimately boil down to either counting or comparing.
Rhett Allain
xAI Adds 19 New Gas Turbines Despite Ongoing Lawsuit
Emails show that Elon Musk’s company is expanding its use of portable gas-fired power at its Colossus 2 site as a fight over air quality continues.
Molly Taft