insect photography
awild | April 17, 2010
Polistes dominula, the European Paper Wasp
captured with an iPhone
As an insect guy, the first question I ask about any camera is: Can I shoot bugs with it?
To my great disappointment, the answer for most cell phones is no. Cell phone cameras are normally fixed to focus at distances useful for party pictures and street shots. Fixed-focus simplifies the mechanics of the onboard camera, but it also makes close-ups of small subjects impossible. Even Apple's iPhone 3GS- which has variable focus- doesn't focus quite closely enough do anything but the largest insects. So when an aphid plague…
awild | April 27, 2008
Myrmecos.net is 5 years old. It has grown from a few dozen photographs to about 4,000, and in recent years 1,500 people visit the site every day. In spite of the site's high profile, myrmecos has not changed in any fundamental way since it first went online in 2003 (archived versions are accessible here). The pages are simple 1990's technology, hand-written in html. There are no underlying databases, just scores of flat files stored in folders. If you do any web design you can imagine what a pain in the behind it is to manage a static site with thousands of individual html files.
It is…