Microsculpture: hidden beauty of the bugs beneath our feet

When photographer Levon Biss turned his lens on the insects his son was collecting in the garden, it opened up a miniature world in which art meets science to dazzling effect

Two years ago, exhausted by the frantic pressures of commercial portraiture, photographer Levon Biss was searching for a way to relax. His son Sebastian, then six, found the answer in their back garden. "My boy likes insects," says Biss. "He's always in the garden trying to find them and play with them. I started shooting insects he'd caught, so that he could see them clearly and be proud of finding them." Making detailed portraits of insect specimens proved to be the perfect antidote to the trigger-happy, "disposable" photography that Biss feels is the current fashion. "I wanted a project that made me think, that was a challenge," he says, and he gradually developed a technique so specialised and laborious, only a photographer of extreme patience and dedication could sustain it.

First, the pinned insect is mounted on an adapted microscope-stand in front of a camera with a macro lens. Biss then divides the insect into 30 sections, to be photographed separately at close range. "When you get to this magnification," he explains, "the depth of field is so shallow, there's only a minute plane of focus." To render, for instance, a whole wing-casing in focus, it must be photographed around 750 times, with each photo taken 10 microns apart. Those 750 images are then painstakingly compiled into a composite, using a variety of sophisticated software.

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