Beauty Through the Microscope: Bugs Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before | Short Film Showcase

[Music] When I first started the project, I started it at home. First specimens of photographs my boy caught for me in the garden. The macro photography suited my work and lifestyle at the time. My commercial work is portrait photography, essentially, but I specialize in sport. I travel quite a lot, so I needed a project that would always be there every time I came back from a trip. And also, I didn't have a huge amount of space, so I needed to shoot something small. I wanted to see how I could take my commercial techniques of lighting into that world.

Initially, Levon came to us, and he had some photographs of beetles and flies and these kind of things, uh, and they looked amazing. And then I showed him the files on the computer. I went zooming into the picture, zooming into the picture, zooming into the picture until he saw the detail in the images. I was immediately blown away by them—the way they were lit and the incredible amount of detail that was in the images. But I thought, well, there are some other things that would look even better.

This is the second largest insect collection in Britain. These ones here, all dotted down the side, aren't they? The specimens had to be interesting shapes or colors, not too big, not too small, clean or cleanable. Even the tiniest amounts of dirt picked up in the photographs. We probably rejected about 99% of the museum's collection. I had trouble finding one of those that wasn't broken. I'll see you in a month. It's a real privilege for me to be playing with these things, and it's very trusting of the museum to allow me to do so.

Working and shooting with microscope lenses turns a traditional photography process upside down. So, for example, I'll just photograph an antennae, and I'll light that antennae so it looks the best as it possibly can. But once I move on to the next section, for example, the eye, the lighting will change completely. I work my way across the whole body of the insect until I end up with 30 different sections, each photograph individually.

Working with microscope lenses inherently gives you a very, very shallow depth of field; therefore, we have to take many, many pictures. So I'll program my closest focal point, and then I'll program my focal point that's furthest away. The camera will then move forward on the rail, automatically take a picture, and then move forward again 10 microns. To give you an idea of how far that is, the average hair on a human head is 75 microns. So most of my final images are made up of somewhere between 8 and 10,000 images.

Once I have those images, I then process them through various techniques and flatten them down so I have one sharp image. So from the start of the process of photographing the insect to the final image is anywhere between 2 and 3 weeks' work. This particular one of my favorite. Fabulous, isn't it? James and the museum were excited to see these pictures. I don't think they'd seen anything quite like them before, certainly not at this scale and not in this amount of detail.

Now when I saw an entomologist excited about these images—and they see a lot of pictures of insects—you know I knew I was onto a good thing. It was obvious that they had to be exhibited somehow. This exhibit will allow people to see part of the museum's collection that they wouldn't normally see, and it also allows people to experience the collection in a new way.

For the Microsculpture project, I'll have around 25 images, and they could be printed large. How, you right? Yeah, very well. Good! We got a new pH—new picture. Brilliant! I'm feeling excited, but I am a bit nervous to see the first one after 2 years coming off of this size. It's great. The exhibition is going to be a special experience for me. I've got to know these little creatures quite well. I've looked at every single part of them for many, many hours, and to see them up, being enjoyed by the public will be a nice [Music] experience.

That is one big insect! Oh, look at the detail in there! I just can't believe how this image has come out—the colors, the saturation, the vibrancy. I've not seen anything like that before. You see these structures, you see lots of detail, and you think, why are insects like that? I hope that the exhibition will inspire future generations of entomologists to discover these things and come up with some more answers. I'm nervous and excited to see the reaction from this—to see the actual specimens themselves and then their photograph at that size. Hopefully, it will be a unique experience. Whether the exhibition will be the end of this project, I don't know. I've got a feeling it might only be the start.