A team of researchers at the University of Washington have created something they're calling "a GoPro for beetles." In reality, it's a tiny, smartphone controlled camera backpack that can ride aboard an insect, giving us a beetle's-eye view of the world.
As I was winding up the fieldwork for Land of Giants, my book about "big tusker" elephants, I shifted focus to another of Tsavo’s majestic inhabitants: the black rhino. Tsavo West is one of the most ruggedly wild and beautiful landscapes I have encountered in Africa, and a fitting bastion for these ancient mammals.
F_MU1 was an incredible elephant. For more than 60 years, she lived a peaceful life in a quiet corner of Tsavo in Kenya. When I first saw her I was awestruck, for she had the most amazing tusks I had ever seen. If I hadn’t looked upon her with my own eyes, I might not have believed that such an elephant could exist in our world. If there were a Queen of Elephants, it would surely have been her.
The photo above is a perfect example of when preparation and luck meet, shake hands, and press down your shutter in unison. Captured by wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, the photo shows a lion cub in the foreground with last September's supermoon eclipse in the background.
Getting up close and personal with large lions is really only an option for a few people in this world; for the rest of us, capturing close-ups requires a bit of engineering. Enter wildlife photographer Steve Mandel and his LionCam.
UK-based wildlife photographers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas got the Internet's attention a couple years ago with the BeetleCam, a special remote controlled DSLR that allowed them to capture close-up photos of animals in the wild that photographers would have difficultly strolling up to. After the success of that experiment, they decided to return to Africa last summer with upgraded (and armored) versions of the BeetleCam in order to photograph lions in Kenya.
Last year we featured the work of Matthew and William Burrard-Lucas, two brothers who mounted their Canon …
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.
The BeetleCam is a remote controlled car that has a Canon 400D DSLR …