These giant jewel beetles are just a small glimpse of the Natural History Museum's 80 million specimens. Photographer Felicity McCabe set out to capture some of their beauty.
Since 2010, the Natural History Museum has been digitising its extensive collections. So far, although the digitisation has been limited to the smaller items such as plants and insects, the process has been tricky.
"People have been out tracking species for a very long time, but in the UK we have only been doing this systemically since 1970s," says Vincent Smith, head of informatics at the Museum. "So if you want to know where a species was before 1970s, probably your only point of reference is to look in a museum collection like ours."
The collections at the Natural History Museum go back hundreds of years, and predominantly feature specimens from the late 1700s and 1800s, when entomology grew in popularity. "This period spans a really important time period for us. This is when climate change started happening," says Smith. "We can use this collection to track things like that."
Originally commissioned by the Financial Times Weekend, McCabe's assignment at the Natural History Museum was inspired by colour. The Colour & Vision exhibition showcased in the summer of 2016 and McCabe looked to nature for inspiration. McCabe's Natural History Museum was also shortlisted for the Sony Photography Awards 2017.
"I started to think about the colour spectrum and ways that I could be playful when photographing these amazing specimens," she says. "For example, when I looked at the bright red skeleton of the organ pipe coral [also in the series], it seemed to make sense to me to present it on a background that was the opposite of the spectrum from red".
But, some specimens, like the giant jewel beetles, could do the the talking for themselves. "Sometimes the specimen was so beautiful that it felt more appropriate to present them in the most quiet way I could, to let their own beauty sing out as much as possible".
Entries for Sony World Photography Awards 2018 are open now and free to enter.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
