A Photographer Captures Nature In Mind-Boggling Detail

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

Today on the show, the highs and lows of being a science photographer.

ANAND VARMA: What sucks is feeling like you’re spinning your wheels and not going anywhere and that you may never go anywhere and maybe you’ve just wasted the last year of your life. That’s the part that feels bad.

FLORA LICHTMAN: If you’ve flipped through National Geographic magazine or scrolled through their social media and caught a stunningly detailed photo of a tiny creature like a picture where you can make out the hairs on a honeybee’s eyeballs or the exact contours of a hummingbird’s forked tongue, then you have probably seen the work of Anand Varma. Varma is an award-winning science photographer and the founder of Wonder Lab, a storytelling studio in Berkeley, California. And today he is taking us behind the lens to show us what it takes to capture these iconic images of creatures who are often overlooked. Anand, welcome to Science Friday.

ANAND VARMA: Thanks so much, Flora. It’s great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: To me, you seem like the kind of person who has an actual dream job, a needle in the haystack kind of job, getting paid to capture beauty in the world, to see the world in a different way, to share that with other people. Please tell me one way in which your job stinks.

[LAUGHING]

ANAND VARMA: There are many ways in which my job is challenging. I think– you’re right. I wouldn’t trade it for another job, but I often find myself faced with a problem I don’t how to solve. And so so much of my job is smacking myself in the face and thinking why did I tell anybody I was going to do this because I don’t what I’m doing. And it stinks to feel like you’re failing, and actually a good chunk of my job feels like I’m failing. And that’s actually not that fun.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Give me an example of one of– a photograph or a series of photographs that was really hard, where you felt like you were failing for a long time.

ANAND VARMA: Oh, OK. So one of my favorite photographs now was really something that I struggled with for many, many months, and this is a picture I took in my friend Chris Clark’s lab of a hummingbird hovering underneath a fog machine. And I knew the picture I was after because I had seen this video taken by a scientist, and I’d seen this formation of these whirlpools of air being created by the hummingbird flapping its wings. And I thought I want to create an image that captures this moment.

And I thought it was fairly straightforward–

FLORA LICHTMAN: You do smoke vortices.

ANAND VARMA: Yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Am I thinking of the right thing?

ANAND VARMA: Exactly. Exactly. It’s a vortex of fog being generated by a hummingbird. And I thought it was going to be fairly straightforward. I talked to the scientists who did the study. I saw the contraption that they built. I recreated it. I knew how to train the hummingbird to feed on the feeder underneath the fog machine.

But when I took the image, I never saw the vortex of air, and I struggled with that for months. And finally what it took was actually taking a high speed video of the behavior so that I could understand was my experimental setup wrong or was my timing wrong. And so once I could see the vortices, those whirlpools of air, in the video, then I knew my setup was right, and then it was just a matter of luck and repetition to get the image. But that was one that was I really felt like I wasn’t sure if I was getting any closer.

I think that’s maybe the part that’s the hardest. It’s not hard. It’s not terrible. It doesn’t suck to work on a hard problem if you’re making incremental progress. What sucks is feeling like you’re spinning your wheels and not going anywhere and that you may never go anywhere and maybe you’ve just wasted the last year of your life. That’s the part that feels bad.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So what keeps you going in those moments?

ANAND VARMA: Oh. In the early years, it was a lot of fear and anxiety. It was just like, well, I can’t fail because then my career is over, and then what am I going to do? So it was more desperation of just, well, I better try something else because I’ve got three days left in this field assignment and I can’t imagine facing my editor and saying I wasn’t good enough. And so I think there was a lot more negative drivers and motivators.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Pride kept you going.

ANAND VARMA: Sure.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah.

ANAND VARMA: Sure. Pride and desperation. I can’t say I fully escaped that, but I think now that I’ve been through that cycle enough times and know that it’s going to be hard every time and that the progress is sometimes unexpected and the solution is sometimes unexpected, it makes it easier to chip away at it. And I think sometimes it’s like looking for the smaller wins and the smaller increments of progress where you’re like, oh, it maybe doesn’t feel like I’m making progress, but I’m still trying ideas. I’m still eliminating bad options.

And I guess I’m– a lot of times, I’m thinking about the reward of getting to share a cool image with an audience, and I’m looking forward to that and seeing someone else’s eyes light up and seeing them experience what I experienced when I first learned about hummingbird wing vortices. And it’s almost like brings it full circle where you’re like you’re passing on that feeling of wonder that you experienced when you first learned about this cool thing, and then you get to share it with someone else.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s talk about your philosophy. You often take these really grand photos of really tiny things. Why that subject matter? What’s the goal?

ANAND VARMA: Well, I think the origin of it came from exploring my backyard in Atlanta. We had a creek running through the forest in the backyard, and I think it was the little things that were just more accessible to me. I read about whales and tigers and elephants, and it was the roly polies and the salamanders and the crawdads were the things that I could find.

And there was something about exploring little things that was endlessly rewarding. It was like you’re always going to find something new, and even in the familiar creatures that you’d seen before, if you looked at them up close, you would see new details. And so I think where I started as a macro photographer and someone who likes to look at little things up close.

I think where it feels important to continue that work is because I feel like what we pay attention to influences what we care about. And so to pay close attention to the world around us is a way to feel more connected to the world around us. And the little things is just one kind of layer of complexity and beauty that we often miss. And so to pay attention to the little thing is like a way of slowing down and trying to feel more connected to the world around us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, and it’s accessible, too, because next time I– I’ve seen your bee pictures, the next time I see a bee, I will look at it differently.

ANAND VARMA: That’s my goal.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Coming up after the break, Anand’s biggest pet peeve of nature photography. Don’t go away.

ANAND VARMA: You would never show a carcass of a lion draped on a rock and be like look at this amazing wildlife.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Have you ever had a surprise where you took a picture of an animal or an organism and you thought, oh, whoa, I– I thought I understood them. I now understand them completely differently or I have a different emotional reaction to them? Do you have a story like that?

ANAND VARMA: Yes. I feel like that overall represents every one of my photographs, but I’m trying to think of a–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Every photo you take, yeah.

ANAND VARMA: Yeah, I think to me, the magic of photography and particularly digital photography is the way that the camera and the lens can show you the subject in a surprising way. And so you start with the subject like a bee that you think that you know what they look like. You have an image in your mind of what you want to take, but then you get up close with the macro lens. You put the light in an interesting location, and you snap a picture. And all of a sudden the hairs on its eyeballs stand out, and you never realized those were there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Eyeball hairs. Who knew?

ANAND VARMA: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah.

ANAND VARMA: Yeah. So the way that the lens can magnify the details, the way that the light can glint off of some feature, it feels like I’m using a camera to explore more than I’m using a camera to document if that makes sense. So it’s not so much that I’m like pre-visualizing an image and trying to then capture what I’ve experienced with my eyeballs. It’s almost like I’m trying to excavate details or discover details that I don’t know are there.

And so for example–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, it’s like a telescope or a microscope.

ANAND VARMA: Exactly. Exactly. And so an example was my first story on parasites. This is– these are subjects that I did not think were going to be beautiful, and I knew that the audience wasn’t going to find them beautiful the way they would find hummingbirds beautiful. But I knew that the stories behind these creatures were really interesting and really surprising. And so then it became my job to find those surprising details and those moments of intrigue or beauty that I could then use to capture the audience’s attention.

So, there’s an example of a worm coming out of the backside of a cricket like that is not one that I would have seen as this– beauty is an interesting word, but it’s like I knew this was going to be a gross thing happening but it was the photograph that made me think of this creature as not just a gross bug but a powerful and even elegant creature in a sort of way.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ooh, elegant. I’m looking at it now. It looks like a yellow tube. I get– I do get powerful from it.

ANAND VARMA: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because it just looks like a string. But it is commanding in that shot. And it’s also pictured– is the cricket in a droplet of water?

ANAND VARMA: Yeah. And so the story here is that that worm that’s emerging from the backside of the cricket, that worm has figured out how to hijack the mind of the cricket. So the cricket drowns itself, and then the aquatic worm can safely emerge from its body. And so I– can argue about whether it’s beautiful, but I think it’s certainly interesting. And that’s–

FLORA LICHTMAN: No. It’s iconic.

ANAND VARMA: I think that’s my goal.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s– it is iconic I have to say we’ve– because this is Science Friday, of course, we’ve covered this exact parasite. And I remember seeing your photo. So it– and it is indelibly seared into my brain. So it worked.

ANAND VARMA: Thank you Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are there tropes in nature photography or wildlife photography that you can’t stand?

ANAND VARMA: Oh, yeah, especially in insect photography, bee photography in particular. I hate it when they show dead insects. And I feel like this is such a common thing. Even in National Geographic, they’ll show a pinned bee that I can tell is just shriveled up. It came out of a drawer somewhere.

And I think, ugh, they’re passing this off as a cool bug, a cool piece of wildlife, but you would never show the carcass of a lion draped on a rock and be like look at this amazing wildlife. And so the fact that the little creatures nobody really cares whether– what their posture and what their body language and what their gesture is. And you don’t have to– maybe only the entomologist can tell whether this animal was photographed alive or not, but I think it makes a difference in how you connect to a creature even if you’re not conscious of what you’re looking at.

I think there is a subconscious connection between looking eye to eye with a creature that is alive versus a creature that’s crumpled up, and you’re purely looking at the details of its wings or the color of its body. And so that’s a thing that bugs me about macro photography.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have your– have any of your photos led to discoveries?

ANAND VARMA: That was a surprising turn in my career when I took a video– I took a timeout lapse of honeybee development. And when that was published by National Geographic, I got messages from honeybee researchers that said, hey, we learned new things about honeybee behavior from your bee video. And I thought, wow, I thought that my job as a photographer was to document the science and the discoveries of other people, and I had inadvertently created my own discoveries. And that really changed how I thought of myself and my career as a photographer. Wow, I can actually contribute new knowledge about the world through photography.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I wonder do you think art can actually help us learn about the world in ways that– or photography, do you think photography can help us learn about the world in ways that traditional science cannot?

ANAND VARMA: I think science is focused on making observations about the natural world, and it tries to avoid attaching an opinion or a value to those observations. I think photography–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Or a feeling.

ANAND VARMA: Or a feeling. And so I am less reluctant to have an agenda in my photography. And so I think about that with the parasite story where I didn’t see my job as purely to convey information or to capture data through images. It was about trying to take a subject that most people don’t think is worthy of their time and attention and elevate it into something that is interesting and stimulates curiosity and worthy of people’s time. And so I feel like the power of photography is to capture attention. And I think it can do that in a way that science alone sometimes can’t.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

ANAND VARMA: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Anand Varma is a science photographer and founder of Wonder Lab in Berkeley, California. To check out some of the photos we talked about, head to sciencefriday.com/upclose.

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Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to rate and review us if you like the show. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We’d love to hear from you. Today’s episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.