With Fujifilm Velvia film, Chalmers gets up close and personal with all sorts of not-so-cuddly creatures.
With Fujifilm Velvia film, Chalmers gets up close and personal with all sorts of not-so-cuddly creatures.
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Life in miniature fills poster-sized photos in the works of Catherine Chalmers, whose exhibits have been mounted worldwide and whose book American Cockroach made readers reexamine the pride and the prejudice with which we squish our insect housemates. From her studio in Soho, New York City, she tells how you, too, can shoot tiny wildlife.
"I like going into places that the human eye doesn't necessarily see," she says of small subjects' appeal. "That's what intrigued me about macro [photography] -- going into these worlds of little animals, whatever the animal is, is fascinating because you get in and see things you would never see with the naked eye. Sometimes even when you're taking the picture you don't really see everything, and then you get the picture back and go, 'Wow I didn't even notice that.'"
Chalmers, of course, goes much further in search of a good image than even the most serious hobbyist. For her remarkable New York Times science-page sequence of preying mantises mating and the male's subsequent cannibalization, she spent months raising the insects from eggs, along with the fruit flies she needed to feed them; misting each young mantis' thimble-sized habitat so that their environments would be damp enough for them to successfully molt; and even lifting the adult insects' wings and counting the number of body segments in order to determine gender, and keep same-sex pairs apart lest they fight to the death for dominance.
Fortunately, you don't have to go that far to shoot the caterpillars, butterflies or ladybugs in your yard, the frogs in the local pond, or, yes, even the cockroaches or spiders you might find in your home. Culturally learned disgust aside, after all, cockroaches have the same armored symmetry and alien-architecture body design as beetles and other bugs we find cute. They're eminently visual subjects. And are we not ourselves, well, shutterbugs?
