I've always been a big fan of bugs, so this book was right up my alley. These photos are incredible. I don't know how he even managed to capture some of these. I read it digitally so I can only imagine how impressive many of the pictures are in a physical version. Just a great coffee table book that shows the detailed side of bugs' lives in a way that most of us have only read about or imagined. Highly recommended for nature lovers, photography lovers, and bug-curious people. (You'll likely think the photos are fascinating enough that you're forget you used to not like bugs!)

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC. All opinions are my own.

A good old-fashioned monograph about insect flight. Yes, insect flight. Our creator talks about it at some small length, and then shows us his first photographic investigation – proving the warp in an insect’s wing to get and keep it airborne, but generally doing the age-old macro thing of throwing the background out of focus, and just giving the flying critter a solitary bubble to pictorially live in. Cut to the second gallery, after the second chunk of writing, and we get a completely different, and if you’re interested in that kind of thing, staggering, look at insects. This not only involves a camera fast enough to capture an insect with no blurring whatsoever – and this is a kind of animal that can completely move the position of its wings in less than a sixtieth of a second – but a lens and POV that really puts you in the position of a fellow insect.

Here are ladybirds taking off (with what are quite poor wings, aesthetically speaking), dragonflies mating, butterflies coming in to feed and going away again, even mating dragonflies leaving together. But we’re not looking down from a godlike height – we’re in the meadows with them, sensing the flowers and suitable grass stems with them, cognisant of the sun at all times as they surely are, and aware in some unknown quantity of a fine if odd-looking church tower behind a couple of them.

I can’t share the author’s love of insects, and his determination to put every frame of their motion in the right context. But I damn well can appreciate an unseen angle on the world – this does put you in their mindset as well as we can assume and capture it. There are flaws, however – the number of species used for the main chunk is desperately small, and needed to be widened however the difficulty involved. And in presenting a stop-motion composite of a take-off manoeuvre the artist has gone in for some little bits of cheating, as we see with the gift of both the composite and the original individual frames. Just to make sure they don’t clash, visually collide and obscure each other the man has shifted the bug to one side from the first frame to the second, and so on, creating a swoop and arc to the launch that just wasn’t really there.

Also, the book as I saw it gave no real biography, allowing me no insight into the man’s pedigree, or uniqueness, or anything beyond a slight mention once or twice of academe. I wanted more autobiography to let me, the ignorant chance reader, know whether I was in the arms of the world’s best at this kind of thing or just an excellent amateur. It did seem the former, though, and the photos are definitely artworks as a result. This is definitely a specialist volume, but to that end it has little wrong about it. My rating is from the average commuter kind of reader’s POV, and not a small white.

This book is packed full of information which in itself is great but the photos are phenomenal! The in-flight images are incredibly captured and the reconstructed sequences are like pieces of art. Truly beautiful book!