Stories by Alex Wild

I like to think some of my photographs succeed for the technical skill and artistry I put into them. Others, it almost doesn’t matter what I do.

The answer can be found in this recent report from the U.S. copyright office: …federal court is effectively inaccessible to copyright owners seeking redress for claims of relatively low economic value, especially individual creators who are of limited resources.

Scared of insects, spiders, and other leggy arthropods? It could be worse. You could be one of them. At that size you face an array of dangers unlike anything you know from your comfortably large human existence.

If you’d like the backstory on how I became a professional insect photographer, SciLog‘s Matt Shipman is running a recent interview.

And now, a simple tip for those just starting out with macrophotography. The tip is so simple, actually, that I just gave away the whole game in the title.

Step 1. Wait at the eggs for a parasitoid wasp to arrive. Step 2. Photograph the wasp laying her own eggs into her target, like so: Step 3: Marvel at how a fully developed wasp in all her intricate detail is an order of magnitude smaller than the egg of a butterfly.

[The following is a guest post by entomologist Guilherme Ide Marques dos Santos, of the Museu de Zoologia da USP, Brazil] Scientific photography is an important part of many publications.

Following on from yesterday’s bite-fest, remember that the post only included selfies, and that photographing selfie-stingies can be difficult.

Since I photograph insects for a living, people frequently ask how often I get stung. The answer is, probably not as much as you’d think.

Earlier, I posed a series of ethical scenarios in which an insect dies as part of a photographic project. I did not mention why I’d written that post, but the piece does have a backstory.

And now, just in time for your long weekend, an ethics quiz! Imagine you have an insect, a camera, and a photography project that might involve the death of your little subject.

I don’t generally photoshop images beyond small crops and levels tweaks, especially for field and behavior projects. However, stylized studio work serves a different purpose, so I allow myself more digital liberties.

Can I feel Schadenfreude for an insect? The blobs on stalks are eggs of a fierce aphid predator, the green lacewing. Lacewings typically attach eggs to vegetation, but the overzealous insect that laid these was frisky enough to oviposit directly on the back of a milkweed aphid.

“If you don’t want people to share your photo, don’t put it on the internet.” -vast numbers of people on the internet, 1995-2013 This refrain is among the most common threads in the great internet copyright wars.

Few natural habitats are as challenging to photograph as tallgrass prairie. This mostly extinct habitat once covered much of central North America, before the discovery that prairie soils were especially productive for agriculture.

Of the arguments thrown around in the great internet copyright wars, the one I find most frustrating is the claim that nature photographs shouldn’t be copyrighted on account of involving little creative input.