Stories by Alex Wild

Here is a powerful method to photograph the world’s most dangerous animal in an unusual moment of vulnerability. But first, a digression into mosquito biology.

What is the secret to the evenly balanced exposure across both the foreground and background in this fisheye photograph? It is not a clever processing job in photoshop.

Anyone paying attention to science outreach in recent years will have learned a great deal about shark biology, whether they intended to or not.

Anyone who booted up a Windows computer in the early 2000′s is likely familiar with the grassy hillsides and brilliant sky of “Bliss”, a 1996 photograph by California wine country photographer Charles O’Rear.

[what's this?]

Over the next few months we will hear news of this winter’s honey bee losses in North America. The news won’t be good. Although official loss tallies have yet to be released, persistently cold weather across the northern part of the continent has made the 2013-2014 winter an unusually difficult one.

And now, the technique I find most useful in the studio for calming an overly active insect. I call it the time-out trick. It goes like this: Place the insect on a flat surface, confine it with an upside-down petri dish (you can buy them here) or a small glass, and wait.

Earlier, I mentioned that chilling active insects to more easily photograph them can give unnatural results. How is the intrepid photographer to work with animals that do not sit still?

Stock photography giant Getty Images took a gamble yesterday, releasing 35 million files for free non-commercial and editorial uses. Images are served in a YouTube-style embedder that displays a credit and links back to the licensing page at Getty.

I often find myself in discussions over how to photograph uncooperative insects, and these invariably descend into the technique of slowing the animals by chilling.

Curious about why you’d want to pay attention to that f/number on your camera settings? Consider: Same subject, same lens, same camera, very different image.

You may know about the vital public health services performed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But did you know that the CDC is also a fount of free images?

On February 5, 1974, NASA’s Mariner 10 returned this surprising image of Venus. The photograph was the first to record our neighboring planet’s clouds in such detail, polar vortex and all.

You may know the classic story about how ants and aphids live together in an ecological partnership. Aphids feed ants their excess sugars in the form of honeydew, and in return ants protect the aphids against predators and carry them to new host plants.

Here is a hypothetical copyright situation where Creative Commons, Fair Use, and Open Access collide in an unusual way to suppress the spread of information.

Since I made everyone else sharea selection of their best photos, it is only fair that I post my own favorites from the past year. Click on each to view large.

The full set- plus a few photos I released last year- are in my public domain gallery. They have also been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a CC0 public domain license.

A few days ago I asked you to submit your best Nature & Science images from the past year, and wow- you did not disappoint! Below, in no particular order, are links to all participants selections.

Judging from the discarded boxes, the shredded gift paper, the frozen sidewalks, and the pile of new calendars, we must have arrived at the end of the year.

Stop what you are doing and watch this: One of the most famous photographs of all time- the earth rising above the moon as seen from Apollo 8′s lunar orbit- was a lucky accident.

Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [iPhone 4S: $300 ; Canon EF 35mm f/2, reversed: $320 ] This week’s Thrifty Thursday features a wheel bug (Arilus cristatus)I found frozen in snow this afternoon on my porch.

Every year, on the first of January, copyrights on certain older creative works expire and the works pass into the public domain. In 2014, for example, a selection of pieces by writer Beatrix Potter and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff will, in some countries,become open for anyone to use, for any purpose, without prior permission.

Because you asked, these are real letters I have sent to people found using my photographs inappropriately. 1. The standard DMCA takedown I send about a dozen of these per week, usually to the web hosts of small pest control companies.

It’s been over two years since I cut the academic anchor and sailed away as an independent nature photographer. How am I faring? My little business is chugging along fine, thanks!