MYRMECOS Little Things Matter

Time 2020-12-19 18:05:07

Web Name: MYRMECOS Little Things Matter

WebSite: http://www.myrmecos.net

ID:139529

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I am excited to announce the return of the Holiday Insect Print Sale, now in its 9th year! I have selected 35-ish photographs that will be available at 70% off my regular fine art prices, starting at $3.99 for a 5 7 print, until January 4, 2021. For (U.S.) delivery by Christmas, you ll want to order by December 11.I encourage you to play around with the mounting/framing options as well, I am particularly happy with the metal-plate mounts, printed on aluminum, with the satin finish. These look and feel like museum pieces, and are what I most often use for public display. All prints are made at Bay Photo in California. We are excited today to announce BugShot 2020! This year s insect photography extravaganza will be held June 18-21 at the amazing Archbold Biological Station in Florida.The BugShot crew is, unusually, returning to the site of a previous workshop. In 2012, we held our second ever workshop at Archbold. The station remains one of my favorite venues, an exceptional eco-conference center, adjoining a large and active natural history collection, embedded in one of North America s richest native ecosystems, the subtropical Florida scrub.Click to register.If you are already part of our community, we’d love to see you again! If you are new, we’d love you to join!***Update (3/19/2020): We are monitoring the situation with the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic. At present we are keeping the event open, but will likely know in April if BugShot 2020/Florida will proceed as planned or be postponed*** I am extremely pleased to have had the opportunity to custom-shoot a cover for this week s Science magazine:The research comes from Armin Moczek s lab at the University of Indiana, known for pioneering studies on the evolution of novel structures. In this case, they figured out that horns are built by co-opting gene networks normally involved in wing development.To produce this cover, we created dozens of alternate compositions, species, and concepts, including live beetles and focus-stacks of preserved specimens. Which I d love to show you, but they re contractually under wraps until the new year. Bear with me I am extremely pleased that Current Biology has featured my focus-stacked yellow fever mosquito on this week s cover!This image challenged me. The small size of the animal required a motionless (=dead) subject for focus-stacking dozens of input photographs. But mosquito bodies are so delicate, so fragile, that they dry out and collapse in a matter of minutes. I burned through a few samples getting the lighting and levels right before finally nailing this one.The cover accompanies new research from Joshua Raji et al in Matt DeGennaro s lab showing how mosquitoes find us using our stinky acidic volatiles. I am very pleased to announce my return to the fabulous BugShot photography workshops!This May we ll be in the stunning Anza Borrego desert in southern California, a landscape that typically resembles Mars but in rainy years bursts into a flurry of life and color. And this has been an exceptionally rainy year! We expect a full buggy explosion.Click to register.BugShot is now eight years old. What started as a one-off weekend course in St. Louis has grown to an international community of nature and photography lovers. If you are already part of our community, we d love to see you again! If you are new, we d love you to join! Following my gallery opening last week in Minnesota, I was privileged to spend a couple hours poking around at Macalaster College s beautiful Ordway Field Station on the banks of the Mississippi. Fall had advanced suddenly and the temperature was too cold for much insect activity. Of course, the ubiquitous cool-tolerant winter ants, Prenolepis imparis, were foraging.Along the trail we happened across an unusual sight. About 100 ants in a cluster on the forest floor, moving cautiously around each other, sometimes lunging with open mandibles, sometimes cautiously tasting other ants, moving from ant to ant.I am not 100% certain what they were doing, but the scene looked a great deal like the ritual battles known from other ant species. When two ant colonies meet, they sometimes estimate each other s strength by engaging in a bit of pushing and shoving, apparently tallying the size and number of the opposition. This behavior is thought to allow them to retreat in the face of a stronger opponent before matters escalate into loss of life (see this 1981 work by Bert Hoelldobler for an example from honeypot ants.)Photo details- Panorama: iPhoneMacro photos: Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens on a Canon EOS 5D Mk IV, f/13, ISO 200, 1/200sec, diffuse twin flash. Click to view large!Here s something unusual: an actual gallery of printed, high-quality Alex Wild prints!Where is this rare beast? In Minnesota:Smail Gallery Olin-Rice Hall, Macalester CollegeSaint Paul, MinnesotaSeptember 2018 to August 2019As you may know, I am a digital creature. I do not often translate my files into physical prints. But my streak of lasting a decade as a pro photographer without staging a large showing has broken. Macalester College in Saint Paul has worked with me over the past few months to bring you Ants: Alien Civilizations Among Us . It features 70 of my pieces on metal or canvas, including a giant panoramic focus-stack I created specifically for the showing.800 individual photographs were composited in a stacked micro-panorama of Messor cephalotes, an African harvester ant.  I created this nearly 5-foot wide piece, printed on a metal plate, exclusively for the Smail gallery. At the gallery s heart is the Diversity Wall. Ants from all over the world, photographed alive and scaled proportional to actual size, are printed on high-quality aluminum plates and interspersed with softer images on canvas of ant scientists working. The effect surpasses even what I had planned. It looks stunning!A few ant action shots.The gallery is located in the atrium of Macalester s science building, Olin-Rice Hall, and will remain until August 2019. If you are in Minnesota this year, I encourage you to have a look. At 10:15 this morning I deactivated my facebook account. I ve had the account for over a decade. No more.I can no longer in good conscience participate in a company whose actions- wittingly or no- have served to increase social and political ills around the world.What could replace the facebook-sized void, which isn t really a void since I don t use it much anymore anyway? I don t know, but let s dust off this bloggy blog. We are slimming down and decluttering for a clean, fast design while Myrmecos Industries organizes a reboot of this decade-old blog.

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