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...
Earlier, I presented four artworks derived from my photographs and asked your opinion as to whether each case could be defended as Fair Use. Without lawsuits to force courts into a decision, there are no unambiguously correct answers...
As regular readers of this blog know, I contend with a great deal of unwanted commercial copying of my photographs. Most are unambiguous infringements: pest control companies pasting my photos onto their coupons, for example.But the copyright line gets fuzzier when artists trace my photographs into various derivatives...
In an age where insect photographers seem engaged in an arms race to produce the sharpest, most detailed, and most magnified images, Rick Lieder of Bug Dreams stands against the crowd as a uniquely impressionistic artist...
Correct credit: photograph by Steve Garvie, distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license. Incorrect credit: photograph from the Wikimedia Commons.
And now, an entry about why I photographed this small brown fly.Students of introductory biology will recognize Drosophila melanogaster (see photo below) as the famous laboratory fruit fly whose mutations taught early geneticists about genes and chromosomes...
Scientific American' s frontpage carries the following story about bringing solar power to the deserts: The vast and glittering Ivanpah solar facility in California will soon start sending electrons to the grid, likely by the end of the summer...
In this post I explain how to take a lurid sex photograph.Or specifically, a lurid photograph of plant sex. Pollination makes a fascinating photographic subject.
Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [iPhone 4S - $330]Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Alex is phoning it in today and posting a cat.
Suppose you are a university researcher and, in the course of a government-funded project using a university-owned camera, you snap a marvelous photograph of your intrepid study subject...
A photographer is suing Buzzfeed for $3.6 million.The infringement itself is so standard for Buzzfeed as to barely be worth reporting. Kai Eiselein's photo of a soccer player was included, without his permission, in a Buzzfeed list...
June 17-22 is National Pollinator Week ! Below are six tips for better photographs of flower-loving insects.But first, a digression on why Pollinator Week matters.
Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [iPhone 4S - $330]The recipe is simple:1. Place comb upright so that both sides are exposed.2.
Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [iPhone 4S - $330] Cell phone cameras have tiny lenses, and while that's a drawback for most photo applications, the little cameras do a remarkable job of impersonating a bug's-eye view...
Few insects so conspicuously mark the arrival of late spring in North America as Xylocopa virginica carpenter bees. Males are especially visible as they raucously guard territories around females' wooden burrows...
Earlier, I blogged about one of my flash diffusers , and about how most flash macro photography is improved by softening the flash's harsh artificial light.
Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [HP deskjet F4280 printer/scanner - $150]This week's inexpensive photo project makes use of a desktop scanner to translate a living plant into a digital specimen...
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