mosquito

Photographer Captures the Plight of Flood Survivors in South Sudan

Peter Caton has photographed the devastating flooding in South Sudan in North Africa over three trips spanning more than a year. There, families are found walking through crocodile-infested waters to find plants such as wild water lilies to eat as their crops have been destroyed by three years of floods.

I Let Hundreds of Mosquitos Bite Me to Get the Perfect Photo

Like most good stories, this one is made of blood, sweat, and tears. Well, maybe just blood and sweat. And clicks -- lots of them. Blood, sweat, and clicks... If you have a fear of blood or find mosquitos disgusting, read on at your own risk.

Photographing a Mosquito Hatching

I suppose like most photographers I have a “photographic bucket-list”, and documenting the life-cycle of the much maligned mosquito has always been high on that list. Like many of my projects, this turned out to be quite the undertaking filled with many challenging and unique problems.

Macro Portraits of Emerging Mosquitoes

Brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas, the same UK-based duo who created a remote-control BeetleCam to photograph wildlife in Africa, decided to get up-close and personal with some of nature's less desirable creatures. The two originally noticed mosquito larvae in stagnant water sitting in the backyard of their home, and decided they'd found their next photo subjects. They patiently set up the photo shoot, waiting for key moment when the adult mosquitoes emerged from their larval state. It's fascinating how delicate and alien the pesky critter is up-close:

Their patience and planning went a long way, Will tells us:
We did a bit of research into their development and discovered that it takes about 1-2 weeks (depending on the temperature) for them to develop into the adult form. This gave us a good amount of time to devise a set up to photograph them as they emerged.

Over the course of about 14 days, we kept a keen eye on their development. We kept the larvae in a glass of distilled water indoors and covered it with perforated cling film - we didn't want to suffer any bites during the night! Once the larvae had turned into pupae, we knew they were close to hatching. We soon discovered that when one straightened out, we had about 5 minutes until they hatched.