Entomologist Alex Wild's life is full of bugs. When he leaves his house in Austin, Texas for work, 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.
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 runsInsects Unlocked,, a program that allows anyone to visit the university's bug collection, pick out an iridescent green jewel beetle or a translucent orange Maricopa Harvester ant, and learn how to photograph it. 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," Wild says. "And they're everywhere!"
The self-described "ant guy"'s fascination with insects began at four years old, collecting ant nests in Allegheny State Park in New York, near where he grew up. Wild 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,” says Wild. “It was really addictive.” After he graduated in 2011, he worked as a bug photographer full-time. Four years later, when he accepted a job at UT Austin, he knew he had to incorporate photography and raised more than $12,000 on Kickstarter to purchase photography equipment.
Wild's 1,300-square-foot collection room houses a million bugs sorted by taxonomy, including wasps from sexologist and entomologist Al Kinsey and 150-year-old beetles from a school teacher in the 1870s. 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. Some people like shooting on brightly colored backgrounds while others go for a more serious approach on black or white. Wild photographs in the lab too, including a new species of ant he discovered on campus. "It’s a parasite of a big-headed ant. It rides around on the backs of the queens of the host species," he says.
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.
