Whichever you wish to photograph, the image can be made more dramatic with backlighting. For this shot I placed a simple desk lamp behind the specimen jar, lined up my iPhone on the other side, and snapped away.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Alex Wild is Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books and media outlets. Follow Alex Wild on Twitter