digital photography

Earlier I listed my pick of the best insect photos of the year taken by other photographers. Now it's my turn. In 2009, I snapped 8000 exposures to produce 805 processed, saleable images of live insects. Below are my favorites. A parasitic Pseudacteon fly targets a fire ant in Argentina Male size variation in Onthophagus dung beetles Aphaenogaster ants are tempted by the elaiosome of a bloodroot seed, Illinois Eastern treehole mosquito larvae, Illinois Trophallaxis in wood ants, Wisconsin Face to face with a giant water bug, Illinois male and female northern walking sticks,…
In 1934, a diminutive book by an unknown author seeded the largest conservation movement in history. The book, Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds, pioneered the modern field guide format with crisp illustrations of diagnostic characters, all in a pocket-sized read. The Guide sold out in a week, but the book's effects are ongoing. To understand the magnitude of Peterson's impact, consider how naturalists traditionally identified birds. They'd take a shotgun into the field, and if they saw something of interest they'd kill it. Birding was necessarily limited to the landed-…