Science Friday - A Photographer Captures Nature In Mind-Boggling Detail

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

If you’ve flipped through an issue of National Geographic or scrolled through their social media, and caught a stunningly detailed photo of a tiny creature—like one where you can make out the hairs on a honeybee’s eyeballs, or the exact contours of a hummingbird’s forked tongue—you have probably seen the work of Anand Varma. He’s an award-winning science photographer, a National Geographic Explorer, and the founder of WonderLab, a storytelling studio in Berkeley, California.Varma speaks with Host Flora Lichtman and takes us behind the lens to show what it takes to capture iconic images of creatures that are so often overlooked.Guest: Anand Varma is a science photographer, a National Geographic Explorer, and the founder of WonderLab. He’s based in Berkeley, California.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

I'm Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today in the show, the highs and lows of being a science photographer. 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. If you 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 could 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 WonderLab, 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.

Thanks so much, Flora. It's great to be here. To me, you seem like the kind of person who has an actual dream job, you know, like 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. 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 know how to solve. And so so much of my job is kind of smacking myself in the face and thinking like, why did I tell anybody I'm going to do this because I don't know what I'm doing? And it kind of, it kind of 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. 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. Oh, okay. 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. And I'd seen. seen this formation of these whirlpools of air being created by the hummingbird flapping its wings. And I thought, OK, I want to create an image that captures this moment. And I thought it was fairly straightforward. These are like smoke vortices. Yes.

Am I thinking of the right thing? 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. So what keeps you going in those moments?

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

Sure, sure. Pride and desperation. I can't say I fully escape 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. 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 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 kind of 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. Let's talk about your philosophy. I mean, you often take these really grand photos of really tiny things. Why that subject matter? What's the goal? Well, I think the, origin of it kind of 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-polys and the salamanders and the cradads 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 that's, 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 like 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. Yeah, and it's accessible too, because next time I, you know, I've seen your bee pictures, the next time I see a bee, I will look at it differently. That's my goal. Coming up after the break, Anon's biggest pet peeve of nature. photography. Don't go away. You would never show the carcass of a lion

draped on a rock and be like, look at this amazing wildlife. Have you ever had a surprise where you took a picture of an animal or an organism and he thought, whoa, 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? Yes. I mean, I feel like that overall represents like every one of my photographs, but I'm trying to think of a... Every photo you take, yeah. Yeah, I mean, 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 kind of 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 know, you never realize those were there.

Eyeball hairs, who knew? Yeah, 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 have 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, for like a telescope or a microscope. Exactly, exactly. And so an example, it was my first story on parasites. Like, 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 like 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 like, I mean, beauty is an interesting word, but it's like, I knew this is 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 like a powerful and even elegant creature in a sort of way.

Ooh, elegant. I'm looking at it now. It looks like a yellow tube. I get, I do get power. from it. Yeah. You know, because it just looks like a string, right? But it is commanding in that shot. And it's also pictured, is the cricket in a droplet of water? 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, you know, it's, you can argue about whether it's beautiful, but I think it's certainly interesting. And that's, no, it's iconic. I mean, it's, it is iconic. I have to say, we, you know, 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 for it. Thank you, Flora. Are there tropes in nature photography or wildlife photography that you can't stand? 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 like a pinned bee. that I can tell is sort of just shriveled up, it came out of a drawer somewhere. And I think, ah, they're passing this off as like

a cool bug, a cool piece of wildlife, but like, you would never show a carcass of a lion like draped on a rock and be like, look at this amazing wildlife.

And so the fact that like the little creatures kind of nobody's really cares whether like what their posture and what their body language and what their gesture is and and and you don't have to maybe only the entomologist can tell like whether this animal is 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 of what you're looking at I think there is a subconscious connection between you know looking at you know looking eye to eye with a creature that is alive versus a creature that's sort of crumpled up

and you're you're purely looking at the details of its wings or the color of its body. And so that's that's a thing that bugs me about macro photography. Have you have any of your photos led to discoveries? That was a that was a surprising turn in my career when I when I took a video, I took a time lapse of honeybee development. And when that was published by National Geographic, I got messages from honeybee researchers that said, hey, we learn new things about honeybee behavior from your, your bee video.

And I thought, wow, I kind of thought that my job as a photographer was to document the science and the discoveries of other people. And I had sort of inadvertently created my own discoveries. And that really changed how I thought of myself and my career as a photographer. I can actually contribute new knowledge about the world through photography. Well, I wonder, do you think art can actually help us learn about the world in ways that, you know, or photography? Do you think photography can help us learn about the world in ways that traditional science cannot? 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, 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. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Anand Barma is a science photographer and founder of Wonder Lab in Brooklyn. California. To check out some of the photos we talked about, head to sciencebriday.com slash up close. 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 Aredi. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.