POND MONSTERS

I am a biology major and digital art minor at Stony Brook University. As such, I wanted this independent project to reflect my interests in both photography and the biological sciences, and what became of this initial framework was a macro-photography project presented as a lab experiment.

I executed this idea by visiting my local pond and collecting water samples to create five different ecospheres to study and photograph. Each sample contained something different; some were mostly moss and plant material, some were water with a bit of sand, and some were a nice mix of the two. Each one contained a large number of tiny organisms to document and were genuinely enjoyable to study. It was exciting to explore what I would find by looking through their contents. The final project PDF contains all of the most interesting organisms I found, but there were also some that were impossible to document, such as the daphnia or “water fleas.” The daphnia were too small and just moved too fast for my camera to ever focus on them. Regardless, this final presentation is a good representation of what was found in my samples.

I greatly enjoyed creating this project and I hope that it is just as enjoyable to view. We don’t realize just how much lives in such a tiny amount of water, and it makes us think about just what was in that pond the last time you swam in it. I think it would be interesting to one day take this experiment further and collect from other local waters – the bay, a canal, or another pond. What emerges may surprise us.