Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
This weekend I am holding a day-long photography course for the Evolution & Ecology graduate students here at the University of Illinois. This is mostly an in-house program, but after the registration dust settled we still have five spots available. Thus, we are opening the doors for general enrollment. If you’d like to participate in [...]
As if you needed another reason to attend our BugShot photo workshop in Belize, it seems we’ll have a rather interesting bit of equipment on hand: Cognisys is a Michigan company that makes electronic gadgets for assisting macro and other science photography, and they have a growing reputation for affordable rigs of high build quality. I have [...]
Over at CE I mentioned the trouble of useful natural history photographs that are technically mediocre: …the blurry capture is my only photograph of [an] animal. Do I upload it to my professional galleries anyway? It won’t look great printed, and I’d feel embarrassed to sell it onwards for, say, a display at a natural [...]
I was planning to close the Spring Print Sale last night, as scheduled, but since I was driving back from Kansas until late I have decided to keep it going for one extra day. Thus, the sale gallery will remain open until 10pm EST tonight for any last-minute orders, with prices starting at $3.99 for [...]
Manhattan, Kansas, that is. Next week I’ll be at Kansas State University giving the following talk: “How To Take Better Insect Photographs” Alex Wild 4:00 pm, Monday, April 29, 2013 Waters Hall 041 Kansas State University Manhattan KS – open to the public – I hope to see some of you there!
Most of my workshops are broadly designed for teaching macro photography. Thus, I am pleased to announce a fun and rather more specialized course, a day-long session on photographing honey bees: Honey Bee Photography June 21st (Friday), 2013 -full day- Long Lane Honey Bee Farms Fairmount, Illinois cost: $89 [register online] The course is intended [...]
An upcoming public appearance! The fine folks at UF have planned what looks like the perfect week for me. In addition to the talk above, I will be giving a more technical presentation on wasp systematics to the Entomology Department, taking field excursions with the graduate students to photograph local ants, and catching up with friends. [...]
You guys were tremendous during my first-ever insect print sale last December. You ordered several hundred prints, quite literally an order of magnitude more than I’d anticipated. So I’m doing another one. The spring print sale will go online in mid-April with 30 selected prints discounted severely, starting at $3.99/each for a 5×7. Here’s the [...]
I can’t believe it has taken me- a professional ant photographer- 10 years to photograph enough mimics to populate a simple web gallery. The recent Belize excursion put me over the top, however, thanks to this little Synemosyna jumping spider found by bugguider Metrioptera during our workshop. Follow the link below to view the new gallery: Ant Mimics [...]
A perk of being in Urbana is the accessibility of Andy Suarez’s University of Illinois ant lab. Yesterday, I borrowed a few of grad student Fred Larabee’s trap-jaw ants for a studio shoot. I was mostly aiming for stylized portraits like that above, but I couldn’t pass up capturing the ants with their trademark mandibles open and [...]
A personal blog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
Myrmecos- derived from the ancient greek word for "ant"- hosts Alex's musings about these and other little creatures that share our planet.
Questions? Email alwild [at] myrmecos.net; or follow @Myrmecos on Twitter.
