Radically Unusual Caterpillars Captured by Photographer Igor Siwanowicz

Scientist and photographer Igor Siwanowicz  has made a name for himself documenting the phenomenal range of shapes, colors, and structures of creatures in the natural world. His many images of unique caterpillars include wild variations like feathery blue spikes, curling burnt-orange horns, and long black whiskers. Siwanowicz also works as a neurobiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia. He shares more than ten years of his photography on photo.net.

Polish photographer Igor Siwanowicz is one of the best masters of macro photography, specializing mainly in insects, reptiles and amphibians. You can talk a lot about the technology and professionalism of the author, but still it is better to see once than hear a hundred times.

Igor Sivanovich was born in 1976 in the Polish city of Krakow. His parents were biologists and he decided to follow in their footsteps in 1995 entered the Jagiellonian University in Krakow at the Faculty of Biotechnology. There he studied until 2000, and after years of training he led in the city of Aarhus, where he wrote a job to obtain a Master of Science. At the end of the university, he enrolled in the graduate school of the Institute of Biochemistry, which was located near Munich. And until 2007 he held the post postdok post there. In 2007, he decided to change his life abruptly and abandoning science, took a great interest in photography.

He found the work of a freelance photographer-naturalist. “My photos are an attempt to answer a purely hypothetical question: what kind of pictures insects and other small animals would like to see on the pages of the magazines Repti-Gala or Playbug. I come to mind the term “glamorous macro”. I focused on living beings who are usually disliked and avoided in every way because they are not nice, fluffy and warm-blooded creatures, but I turned to them, of course, not for that reason. Strange, alien forms attract ayut me.”

Insects are creatures alien to us, reminiscent of aliens from other worlds, and the closer you get to them, the stronger this impression. Reptiles, in turn, demonstrate their delightful, baroque structure, scales, horns and hypnotizing eyes. And even the frogs are full of charm and grace, albeit in its sticky, slimy manner.

It’s vivid color images show tree-like structures of molten antennas, wild details of shell sock and otherworldly forms of spores of plants. The photos are taken with a confocal laser-scanning microscope, capable of “seeing” a huge amount of detail beyond what you could capture with a traditional microscope on the lens.