At any given moment, there are an estimated ten quintillion insects flying, buzzing, crawling, creeping, hopping, and tunneling on, over, and into planet earth. That’s ten followed by eighteen zeros: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000. And all it took was one—a single green bottle fly—for Thorben Danke to fall in love with photographing them.
The date was July 22, 2016, and Danke, who lives in Besigheim, Germany, was testing his new SLR, his first camera with interchangeable lenses. He snapped a close-up of the fly, was awestruck at the detail it showed, and tumbled right down a rabbit hole. From that first simple photography setup, he moved from one lens to another, creating progressively more sophisticated and magnified photos. Today, most of his images are taken with a Laowa 25mm UltraMacro 2.8 lens, and he also uses microscope lenses from Mitutoyo and Nikon. Ultra close-ups might require four Yongnuo 560III flashes. To create an image that’s in sharp focus across an insect’s body, he “stacks” hundreds of
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