SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - Thanks to a time stamp, Thorben Danke knows the exact moment he got hooked on photographing insects. On July 22, 2016, at 6:05 p.m. he happened to see a green bottle fly sitting near him on his garage wall. Danke had been playing around with the settings on his pricy new digital camera, learning how to focus on closer subjects. He snapped a photo of the fly, and when he looked at the shot on his computer, he was amazed. The quality was so good that he could see the ommatidia, or individual units, of the insect’s compound eyes.
“From that point on, I was drawn into macrophotography,” he writes in an email, “driven by the overwhelming beauty of insects and the fascination with these little jewels on my doorstep.”
Some scientists who have spent their careers studying insects see captivating images like Danke’s as important. “Maybe at the heart of conserving insects is to be able to see them and connect with them,” says Hollis Woodard, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, “and these images are obviously a great way to do that.