I'm Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, the highs and lows of being a science photographer.

What sucks is feeling like you're spinning your wheels and not going anywhere,

and that you may never go anywhere, and maybe you've just wasted the last year

of your life. That's the part that feels bad.

If you flipped through National Geographic magazine or scrolled through their social media

and caught a stunningly detailed photo of a tiny creature, like a picture where you could make out the hairs on a honeybee's eyeballs or the exact contours of a hummingbird's forked tongue, then you have probably seen the work of Anand Varma.

Varma is an award-winning science photographer and the founder of Wonder Lab, a storytelling

studio in Berkeley, California. And today he is taking us behind the lens to show us what it

takes to capture these iconic images of creatures who are often overlooked.

Anand, welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks so much, Flora.

It's great to be here.

To me, you seem like the kind of person who has an actual dream job,

you know, like a needle in the haystack kind of job,

getting paid to capture beauty in the world,

to see the world in a different way,

to share that with other people.

Please tell me one way in which your job stinks.

There are many ways in which my job is challenging.

I think you're right. I wouldn't trade it for another job, but I often find myself faced with a problem I don't know how to solve.

And so so much of my job is kind of smacking myself in the face and thinking like, why did I tell anybody I'm just going to do this?

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