Science

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 Santillana
    01
    Entomologist 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 Santillana
    02
    Wild 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 johnson
    03
    All 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 morgan
    04
    Wild’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 Perez
    05
    In 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 johnson
    06
    Wild'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 santillana
    07
    The 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 santillana
    08
    Some people like shooting on brightly colored backgrounds while others go for a more serious approach on black or white.
  • christopher johnson
    09
    For 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.

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Charley Locke is a writer for WIRED covering culture and photography. ... Read more
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