Alex Wild is a freelance photographer, lecturer and researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On his blog Compound Eye ( http://blogs.scientificamerican .com/ compound-eye ), he writes about science photography and shares his work and techniques. You can also follow him on Twitter as @Myrmecos and see more of his work at www.alexanderwild.com. Questions and answers have been edited.

Q: Has your knowledge of the insect world helped you succeed as a specialist in insect photography?

That's about 95 percent of it. I have good photographs, but I'm not a really amazing photographer like some people who have this immense natural talent. But I have the advantage that I know what I'm photographing. I'll see an absolute brilliant photo of a beetle and it's up there on Flickr and it's labeled "cockroach." Photographers often don't have the technical knowledge to know what they're shooting, especially when you get to really diverse groups, like insects.

Q: Are there challenges that make science photography different than photographing other subjects?

A whole lot of other photography deals with people - and that's a whole other difficult thing. In portrait photography, you can actually talk to your model. You couldn't do that with a beetle. ... It's different in some sense because I don't have any control over what the animals are doing. They're doing their thing, and my ability to intervene to get the photo I want is limited - especially if my intervention interrupts a particular behavior.

Q: Are there any shoots that are particularly difficult?

Behaviors are always difficult. I have a shot of a gliding ant. When you knock them off a branch, instead of falling 35 meters (almost 115 feet) to the forest floor - which would be a death sentence for them - they glide back to the tree trunk well before they hit the ground. I really wanted a shot of one of these ants in midair. That turned out to be a bit challenging, because you can't just sit there in the rainforest and hope an ant goes by. We had to drop several ants, one after another, and work out the timing and which individuals were performing better. That was an all-morning thing.