The many facets of science photography
Can I feel Schadenfreude for an insect? The blobs on stalks are eggs of a fierce aphid predator, the green lacewing. Lacewings typically attach eggs to vegetation, but the overzealous insect that laid these was frisky enough to oviposit directly on the back of a milkweed aphid...
“If you don’t want people to share your photo, don’t put it on the internet.” -vast numbers of people on the internet, 1995-2013 This refrain is among the most common threads in the great internet copyright wars...
Few natural habitats are as challenging to photograph as tallgrass prairie. This mostly extinct habitat once covered much of central North America, before the discovery that prairie soils were especially productive for agriculture...
Of the arguments thrown around in the great internet copyright wars, the one I find most frustrating is the claim that nature photographs shouldn’t be copyrighted on account of involving little creative input...
Earlier, I presented four artworks derived from my photographs and asked your opinion as to whether each case could be defended as Fair Use. Without lawsuits to force courts into a decision, there are no unambiguously correct answers...
As regular readers of this blog know, I contend with a great deal of unwanted commercial copying of my photographs. Most are unambiguous infringements: pest control companies pasting my photos onto their coupons, for example.But the copyright line gets fuzzier when artists trace my photographs into various derivatives...
In an age where insect photographers seem engaged in an arms race to produce the sharpest, most detailed, and most magnified images, Rick Lieder of Bug Dreams stands against the crowd as a uniquely impressionistic artist...
Correct credit: photograph by Steve Garvie, distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license. Incorrect credit: photograph from the Wikimedia Commons.
And now, an entry about why I photographed this small brown fly.Students of introductory biology will recognize Drosophila melanogaster (see photo below) as the famous laboratory fruit fly whose mutations taught early geneticists about genes and chromosomes...
Scientific American' s frontpage carries the following story about bringing solar power to the deserts: The vast and glittering Ivanpah solar facility in California will soon start sending electrons to the grid, likely by the end of the summer...
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