Field trip

Had my appointment with Jim, one of the insect curators at the Field Museum, on Friday. What a nice and helpful guy! And what an incredible collection! It was quite amazing to see all the rows of rows of shelves that reminded me of library stacks and knowing in each, there are hundreds of specimens. I wish I had the time to go through all of them. As it was I spent about 3 hours there, and photographed about 15 trays of specimens - a small fraction of the ones I'd like to go through for this project... Apologies to Jim, who has to escort me to and from the space, for the upcoming pestering! :P


So here are the first photos I "processed" in Photoshop, taken with a nikon 60mm ("Bob" - no, I don't name all my lens, just this one, which started jokingly and stuck.)

One thing that struck me as I was looking at the trays is the incredible beauty and equal brutality of the pinned insects. It was almost surreal. (The other was how amazing these scientists' brains must be, to contain all "faces" and the strings of crazy long names.) With that in mind, I made the colors more vibrant, like how they would look when they were alive (some, over a hundred years ago). I'm fascinated by the pins and the patterns that showed obvious human arrangement. I like how they emphasize the beauty and brutality of life and death, and human's interaction with nature.





(dunno why this is underlined - technical glitch - not emphasizing content...)

Found an on-line site that sells live cocoons and eggs!! I wanted Ios (featured in this group of photos) but right now they only have luna moths. It seemed luna are easier to rear and possible to do so indoors anyway. So now I have to see if I can find sources of food nearby (which would be "fun", since I can only recognize gingko trees). My mom's promised to get me 7 cocoons for my birthday. The real gift is she's going to help me take care of them and manage the cats! Happy birthday to me!!