Our next Fireside Meeting will be on:
Monday, October 7th, 7:30 pm
This will be a Hillside Club member benefit.
Open to the public, with a requested $10 admission charge to benefit our speaker fund.
Beauty and the Bizarre:
An up-close look at small wonders of nature, and the stories behind the science.
Speaker: Anand Varma, natural history photographer, National Geographic and TEDtalk speaker, and Berkeley resident.
When Anand Varma takes a photograph of a parasitic wasp consuming a caterpillar from the inside, he doesn’t want you to be disgusted. He wants you to be astonished. After all, he’s devoted years of his life to perfecting his techniques to create dramatic, bizarre—and beautiful—images of the miniature world around us. In these truly unique images, he reveals the secret life cycle of the honeybee, captures the lightning-fast behaviors of hummingbirds, and offers a rare glimpse at our world's small wonders. Bio: Anand Varma is a photographer and videographer who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. He started photographing natural history subjects while studying biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He uses photography to reveal the invisible details around us with the goal of sparking a sense of wonder about our world. In 2010, he received a National Geographic Young Explorer grant to document the wetlands of Patagonia and has since become a regular contributor to National Geographic Magazine. His first feature story, called “Mindsuckers”, was published on the
November 2014 cover of National Geographic and won a World Press Award for best nature story. Since then, he has photographed stories on honeybee research, hummingbird biomechanics and carnivorous bats. National Geographic named him an Emerging Explorer in 2017 and a Media Innovation Fellow in 2018.
Our final Fireside of the year will be on: