Original subtitles

[music playing]

ROBERT OELMAN: What is real?

'Cause there's no instructions, there's no guidance.

You can't follow the culture to tell you what to do.

A person can open their eyes to change their life

and change themselves.

Spectacular things exist on this earth

that we don't really know too much about.

There is some purpose that we're intended

to follow and do something.

But I'm exploring the very little

known world of exotic insects.

I'm using this modern technology of macrophotography...

new cameras, new lenses...

to magnify something that is normally very difficult to see.

[music playing]

I've spent a lot of time traveling throughout the Amazon

basin, searching for insects.

And it all started here in Colombia.

You can find a lot of insects in one place.

You can find nothing.

And yet there's no explanation for it.

Very little is known about insects, and where they live,

and their populations.

I can't go and look anywhere for a specific insect,

because nobody knows it's there or not.

Youse look, and you see what you can find.

And some of these are extremely exotic.

I was seeing things that I never noticed before.

Pretty... green legs, green-and-brown legs, red eyes.

What was noticeable to me was the instinct to survive,

to not be killed and to survive, is extremely strong.

Oh, look at the... look at the...

the black drop coming out.

That's a toxic substance.

It's used for self-defense.

It's not like the intelligence of a human being that's

all connected with a big brain.

It's just something organic.

Every time I would look for an insect,

I'd find some kind of spectacular thing.

And eventually, I got hooked.

Mhm.

Nice.

[jungle sounds]

[music playing]

ROBERT OELMAN: Ever since childhood, I've

been interested in psychology.

I've always had empathy for what people are feeling.

It was easier for me to understand other people.

And the same time, I was trying to figure out a way

to understand myself and what had happened

to me as a child with the aim, really,

eventually, to cure myself.

We grew up in southern Ohio, in Dayton, Ohio,

in the southwestern part of the state.

This was a pig farm.

And I don't know whether you've ever been to a pig farm,

but you don't really want to be in a pig farm.

ROBERT OELMAN: My childhood was tough.

It was really more than tough.

So it was either 100% perfect.

You were 99%, you got it.

You got whacked.

ROBERT OELMAN: I was a therapist approximately 20 years.

I helped some people.

But the help that people receive really

is not through what I did.

It's through what they do.

I think he took very seriously the concerns and upsets

of his patients, to the extent that it

was starting to bother him.

Sometimes, when we would visit with him

during that period of time, he was lost in another world.

ROBERT OELMAN: At some point the energy

that I was feeling in doing this work

was not the healthiest energy.

As most people that are in therapy,

they're depressed in some way or another.

The depressed energy is something that

has an effect on other people.

So it was pulling my energy down.

My brother thought that during his practice

he was feeling his patients and his patients were feeling him.

So that was a great source of frustration.

ROBERT OELMAN: In essence, they're

putting the responsibility for their lives onto me.

And I didn't like that too much.

It's an unpleasant thing, because then I

didn't know what to do.

Do I just wait for them to work through this,

or do I need to call the police?

And this happened many times.

Very bad experience for me.

ELIZABETH OELMAN: He was really in a state of quiescence

for a while.

I think he wanted to start something new,

but I don't think he knew what it was.

BRADFORD OELMAN: My brother stopped practicing

psychology in the early '90s.

He was about 50 years old.

ROBERT OELMAN: It's a lot of stress.

You're in a situation with just a lot of negative energy.

So it was time for me to go do something else.

And I felt I was just going into totally unknown...

an unknown life.

[thunder]

I had a girlfriend once, and she gave me a book

by Garcia Marquez called "Love in the Time of Cholera,"

a very strange book about Colombia.

I was impressed by his writing.

I was impressed by the life view that...

that's reflected in the book.

I thought, hmm, this Colombia's got to be a lot more loose

and freer kind of environment.

That's when I started visiting Colombia.

What impressed me most was the friendliness of people there...

friendly, open people wanting to engage with you.

[speaking Spanish]

[speaking Spanish]

ROBERT OELMAN: People are not racing

around as fast as Americans.

They're not as competitive.

They're always eager to talk and really be friendly.

Here in the United States, I could call a friend and say,

let's have lunch.

And she might say to me, well, I can have lunch

in three weeks at 12 o'clock.

You don't find that in Colombia.

Life in Colombia is very different from the life

in the US.

I thought to myself, why not take this leap

and move to Colombia?

MARGARET TUTWILER: The Department of State

warns that due to recent events, Colombia's security situation

is unsettled and likely to remain

so in the indefinite future.

REPORTER: Escobar was notorious for killing

anyone who posed a threat to his overwhelming power and riches.

ELIZABETH OELMAN: Kidnappings, terrorism, drugs,

all sorts of things loomed, and I kept thinking that Bob would

not be able to go unscathed.

BRADFORD OELMAN: I didn't know anything about Colombia

until six months after he'd gone there,

and my parents told me that Bob had gone to Colombia.

And I had absolutely no idea why he had done so.

He was brave from day one, different and brave,

because that's brave to go against the...

the expectation.

I think he was following an instinct,

see where it would lead.

In order to progress, one has to overcome a lot of fears.

And that's what I did.

BRADFORD OELMAN: About the same time

Bob decided he would go to Colombia,

a terrible thing happened, because one

of our sister companies, one of their executives in Colombia

was kidnapped, and held for over a year for ransom,

and was eventually released.

Naturally, we were very fearful, scared,

and I was kind of upset that that was his choice.

I did know that Colombia was a dangerous place.

It didn't bother me at all.

If you get stopped at a roadblock,

you could be kidnapped, taken up into the mountains.

Somehow I just thought, that's not going to happen to me.

Somehow I knew, if I go to Colombia,

I have no idea what's going to happen

to me after that, no idea.

I just saw it as a possibility for a new way of life.

Danger... there's danger, but there's danger everywhere.

To be bored in life and to go through the motions, to me,

is living a form of death.

So if something new is dangerous, so be it.

I was robbed at several times, taken advantage of.

And then I learned quick.

I learned quick to be much more vigilant, not

so friendly, not so trusting.

There'd be terrible days that I just felt terrible being there.

And then the next day would be a wonderful day.

I started getting to know people,

started learning Spanish.

It's like the old person died, and it's

time to create a new one.

Eventually, I saw a piece of land

in the mountains outside of Cali.

And it was just like a wasteland really,

a lot of garbage, a lot of dead trees,

but it had a certain form to it.

I saw the potential for this place.

And I said, oh, I could live here and write a book.

It cost, like, 40,000 bucks.

And I bought the land.

I mean, this is a big leap, a leap of faith, really,

that I could have a good life in Colombia.

Really, I didn't know.

Maybe I would have a terrible life in Colombia,

but it seemed like a good thing to do.

And I think it did become a project, special project.

A "finca" is a house in the country

with some land attached to it.

I became a custodian of this piece of the earth.

And this changed my psychology, because now it was not just me.

I was me and this land.

Created some stability for me, because I had a place to live.

I had the earth. It was part of me.

I had these projects to do, and then other projects began.

It was right about that time when

I began taking photos of all these aspects of life

in Colombia.

[music playing]

I began to take photos of flowers

that existed where I lived.

One day I saw a hummingbird at the flowers,

and I just thought, I wonder what would happen if I

put out hummingbird feeders.

There was one hummingbird that came.

And then for three years, new hummingbirds would come.

All these hummingbirds just kept pouring in.

And that really was the start of serious photography.

You could take a photo of a hummingbird.

And you look at the photo, it's terrible... terrible photo...

because you can't take a normal photo of a hummingbird

and have it be a good photo.

So one has to think of, how do I do this?

So I studied this, and I learned how

to take a good photo of a hummingbird, which means,

how do you stop a movement of a wing that's

going 50, 60 beats per second?

Then I set up my own hummingbird studio.

And eventually, I could take a good photo of a hummingbird.

And this led to a kind of a confidence

that if I could take a good photo of a hummingbird,

I could take a good photo of anything.

I was in the north of Colombia one

day, doing a travel photography project.

And that's when it happened.

I saw a beetle on a bush.

With a normal lens, I took the photo of this beetle.

Then afterwards, I'm looking at the photo.

And I see that this beetle has his hand like this,

and out of his hand is a...

like a chord that leads to two prongs like this.

So in effect, he's got two hands in one.

And I realized, I'd never seen that before.

I'd never seen an insect really up close.

That just started a kind of trigger.

I mean, it just... that was like a trigger...

take photos of insects.

[music playing]

I got a macro lens and started going out, looking for insects.

Soon as I began that, I discovered

a lot of fantastic phenomenon.

But I realized that I couldn't do this work by myself.

A

Christian is my assistant in the photography.

He's also the [Spanish] in my finca.

A [Spanish] is a person who administers the finca,

does all the physical work there.

He lives there with his family.

And through the years, I've become

very close to this family.

He came to me by accident.

I hired him, and then I said, Christian,

let's go and look for insects.

And then after a very short time, he became an expert.

ROBERT OELMAN: We started, like, eight years ago.

And then through the years, the eyesight of Christian

has developed so much that he can

see a lot of things that are basically

invisible to other people.

He learns to recognize small movements,

see small things at a greater and greater distance.

It's a training of the eyes that takes place

over the course of many years.

[music playing]

ROBERT OELMAN: To develop the techniques has

been a process over 10 years.

So during that 10 years, it's just improvising every year...

improvising, analyzing the photos.

What works?

What doesn't work?

How can make it better?

You do anything to reduce.

Now it's too much light...

too much, too little.

OK.

Ugh.

See, this is too hard, so we need a third person.

Not bad.

It's constantly evolving.

The idea is always trying to make the photos better.

So I try different things.

You just allow a process to take place in

and experiments to happen.

A lot of people are very afraid of handling insects.

Some of them are actually aggressive, can bite you.

The majority are not.

He's trying to eat my...

my finger.

Spiders... you got to figure out, you know, which ones are

aggressive, which one's not.

So are we sure?

CHRISTIAN: Mhm.

ROBERT OELMAN: So this spider, you

get him to walk over your hand.

He won't do anything.

Not that I'm going to try that.

Ooh, nice.

Get real close now.

I don't know what kind of a spider it is, but...

because there's so many kind of spiders.

It could be... oh...

this one here is a Brazilian wandering spider

and has the ability to kill a person rather quickly.

It bites you, and you lose the ability to breathe.

It's the most toxic of all the spiders.

We don't want to get bitten by it.

Took a process of years of learning what's dangerous

and what's not.

What I was learning about the life force in insects

was they're formidable.

You know, they're spectacular creations of evolution,

of some kind of very long process

that's been going on millions and millions of years.

It's a stressful situation for an insect,

because an insect assumes that anything

big or bigger than it has an aggressive intention

toward them.

So we try to offset that by showing them that we're

not trying to hurt them.

We're just trying to do this strange thing of flashing

a light and taking a...

taking a photo.

Ooh.

I'm trying to convince that that's what we're doing.

We're just taking a photo.

And then after that, then they can go about their business.

What you doing?

What you doing?

Do you want to say here?

Do you think this is your new home?

Sometimes you can see an insect change his behavior,

and after 10 minutes, let's say, looks

to be posing for a good photo.

I started just where I lived in Colombia, just

around the house.

Found everything we could find.

After a while, we didn't find anything new.

Then I went further and further afield

and went into a rain forest which is

three hours from where I live.

[chuckling]

As you're driving downhill, this is going

west toward the Pacific coast.

And it's like you're entering into a place that

looks like Jurassic Park in the movie.

It's a magical kind of place.

[music playing]

Found a lot of stuff there.

[speaking Spanish]

[music playing]

We did that for a couple of years, traveling close to home,

finding cool things.

But after a while, I decided we needed to go

further into the rain forest.

We're exploring the very little-known

world of exotic insects.

They're insects that have developed

within the Amazon forest.

And some of these are extremely strange.

There was a recent estimate that came

out of 8.7 million animals.

But if you look at the proportion of those which

are insects, all of the estimates

say there should be about 80% of all animal life are insects.

We know almost nothing about these things.

And yet you think about what they do.

They're a food source for virtually the entire food web.

So all those species of insects are feeding everything.

We wouldn't have birds.

We wouldn't have a lot of mammals.

We wouldn't have bats, if we didn't have the insects

that they're feeding on.

They are the foundation for everything

we see around us out there.

If you want to study biodiversity,

you need to study insects.

They're dominant in the world.

They've always been dominant in the world.

And there's estimates that we know

just a fraction of the number of species that are out there.

I think we can increase that diversity

quite a bit by just investigating a lot

of these different groups.

ROBERT OELMAN: So we're going to take a trip from Cali

to Manu National Park in Peru.

And this is a long trip.

We get up early in the morning.

We drive from the finca to the airport.

We fly from Cali to Bogota, Bogota to Lima,

and Lima to Cuzco, Cuzco to Puerto

Maldonado, which is a frontier city

that's on the edge of the...

of the jungle.

So now we have to try to find a...

a large taxi.

But look at the size... look at the size of the taxis.

[interposing voices]

[speaking Spanish]

[interposing voices]

[music playing]

I think that one of the most important

things that Robert's work does is

gives these animals a dignity.

And even if it's just having people

appreciate their beauty more...

I mean, when I look at some of his photos,

I can't believe that they even...

a creature like this even exists.

They're insects that are really have developed

within the Amazon forest.

Ooh.

There you find the most elaborate things.

GAVIN SVENSON: Photographers that are out in the field

capturing a lot of diversity do a great service

getting information out in terms of what's really out there, all

the cool different things and the different forms

that people aren't usually exposed to.

Having images of life on Earth of that nature inspires people.

It really raises the awareness of what's at stake.

ROBERT OELMAN: What I'm doing is using

macrophotography to magnify something

that's basically small.

And if something is small, human beings can...

can ignore it, and that's a big problem.

DOUGLAS INKLEY: How many insects have you walked past

because you never saw them?

When people see these creatures that they'd

never possibly believed existed, it's amazing to them.

And they become interested in nature.

They become interested in wildlife.

And they become interested in conservation.

That is so important that they do that.

SUZANNE PELLETIER: I started looking through Robert's work.

And I remember feeling a little embarrassed.

I had spent my time in the forest

looking just at these big things and not

realizing the majority of life around

me was something that I'd never seen before.

ROBERT OELMAN: We are looking for the weird ones,

the strange ones, the beautiful ones, the ugliest ones...

really, the most interesting and photogenic ones.

There are so many incredible insects out here,

but some of my favorite ones to find are the katydids.

So you have these two different branches of katydids.

One wants to be undetected, wants to be invisible,

and the other, who wants to be visible.

The visible one, he wants to advertise

that he is not good to eat or that he's a fighter.

He's going to possibly hurt you.

The hard part about that is, some of these guys

are so quick and agile.

Ooh.

He's aggressive.

Whoa!

You can hold it like this, and it will escape.

It will fall down or escape in some way,

turn over, and bite your finger at the same time.

CHRISTIAN: [speaking Spanish]

So as I was saying...

CHRISTIAN: [speaking Spanish]

As I was saying, he bites very hard.

The bright colors are an indication of,

you don't want to fool with me.

I taste bad, or I'm going to bite you bad.

So I get the shot that's like this open,

and but she can go like this.

She can do it so wide that she can

get to your end of your finger.

This has a name.

You know what the name is?

Spiny devil.

This is all deep rain forest creations

that are more elaborate so they can escape

detection by the predators.

This is dun, dun, dun, dun.

It's a female baby katydid.

So it has these appendages around the joints of the legs

to make it look like just kind of a mess.

But when you look at it closely, you know, you can... ooh,

that's a good one.

I'll get the head right there.

The other katydids that want to be invisible,

they're probably pretty good to eat.

And they developed extreme camouflage.

The camouflage technique is something

that becomes incorporated into its physical structure.

One of the tricks of the leaf-mimicking

katydid is there's...

there can be a line that runs right up

through the center of the eye.

And that sort of changes the perception

that there is an eye.

There's a central vein in the leaf.

There are all these different details in the leaf,

including rotten out spots, mold spots.

Whatever a leaf can be, these guys are imitating them.

And since there's an infinite number of leaves,

and different shades and colors, there are a infinite number

of leaf-mimicking katydids.

It's a process of evolution over millions

of years, a perfect disguise.

This has so many different just subtle tones, different colors.

The highly disguised insect is hard to find

but is easier to photograph, because it's programmed not

to move very much, because movement

means that it can be detected.

This is really the most extreme leaf katydid in terms of,

the part that looks like it's been eaten

goes very deep into the wing.

And it crosses the vein in the middle of the leaf.

We've never seen anything like that before.

BRUCE STEIN: It's just remarkable

when you see the way in which so many of these insects

have been able to develop body forms that absolutely mimic

their backgrounds, whether they're looking

like dead leaves, or the tree bark on which they

perch, or like little twigs.

ROBERT OELMAN: They've hardly been studied, very few photos,

because somebody not familiar with these insects

will never see them.

And yet they're dependent on their unique environments

in order to live and survive.

BRUCE STEIN: And as we see decreases in habitat,

either complete loss through conversion to other land

uses or degradation of the habitat,

then essentially it undermines their ability

for a long-term survival in those places.

It's economics.

It's money.

I mean, whether it's on a very small scale or a larger scale...

I mean, government creates policies

for economic growth, which often affects their environments.

Most people do not resist.

You have a chance to make a lot of money,

gonna make a lot of money.

What happens to the forest, the natives that live there,

the animals?

You're gonna forget about that.

If the price of oil goes up, oil extraction increases.

There's an incredible amount of oil extraction

right now in the Amazon.

Over 70% of the Peruvian Amazon is leased out to oil companies.

STUART MCKAMEY: With deforestation,

we're losing species before they're being discovered.

There have been times when I've been collecting in an area

where ashes are literally falling on me.

ROBERT OELMAN: In the jungles on the eastern part of Ecuador,

below the Earth is just vast sources of oil.

The president of Ecuador has decided, you know,

sell these lots off to the big oil companies.

SUZANNE PELLETIER: We know that these animals

need their habitat to survive.

You know, we're losing tens of thousands

of species every year, most of them in the tropics,

because of deforestation.

ROBERT OELMAN: The cutting down of the trees

for illegal logging is really out of control.

I just try to go to places that are farther away

from this kind of activity.

ROBERT OELMAN: You know, there's a lot

of things that are already here, but we just don't see them.

They're hidden from us.

They're on the other side of that leaf.

ROBERT OELMAN: Woo.

ROBERT OELMAN: We can see just how

remarkable this young man, Christian, is,

because he sees everything.

Christian, he goes out at night.

He comes in maybe at 2:00 AM.

He goes to sleep.

I don't know what he's found until the following morning.

And then he gets up, and he notices I'm awake,

and he says they found a super champion.

Wow, wow, wow.

- [speaking Spanish] - OK.

Oh, wow.

When he says, super champion, we know he's ecstatic.

And we go to work.

Turns out what he's found is a new type of treehopper.

We've never seen anything like this.

It's a special feeling.

The fossil record for treehoppers

is, like, 40 million years.

A treehopper was found in Amber and dated back that old.

So they've been around a long time.

Taking a photo of a small thing with a macro lens,

the lens is maybe this close to the insect.

Treehoppers are from one millimeter in length

to 10 millimeters, which is a centimeter.

So I get nervous.

The nerves are, will I be able to take a good photo of this,

or will it escape?

You don't have any depth of field,

so you can't get a clear focus unless all

the parts of the insect are equal distant to the lens.

Over time, you know, the steadiness in holding this kind

of apparatus is pretty good.

[deep breathing]

Ooh, look at that.

This is the ant, that's the treehopper.

This is a big ant, this is a little treehopper.

The treehopper eats the phloem, the liquid,

that's inside the stems here.

And then it excretes drops of liquid,

and the liquid is sweet.

So the ants like the liquid, so they

take care of the treehoppers.

They protect the treehoppers.

Hoppers

His eye is black so we got to get more light from Christian's

flashlight through there.

They can be tough to work with.

Treehoppers are difficult, because they're

very sensitive to vibrations in the air.

We're working with a special treehopper.

And it jumps, and flies, and then you lose it.

And you lose it inside the studio.

And you look.

30 minutes you look for it.

You can't find it.

The adventure really is finding things that are new,

that we've never seen before.

No, I don't have anything like this one.

One of the tools for discovering new species

is actually looking at photographs

that people have taken, because the more

eyes that are on the ground, the more things

are going to be discovered.

It's great to see photographs of things

that have been photographed live for the first time.

This could very well be a new species.

And here's a slide.

OK, we got the weirdest treehopper in the world here.

The variety of treehoppers is really infinite.

Those that have been classified, maybe there are 3,000.

But actually in reality, how many are there?

Maybe there are 10,000, maybe there are 20,000.

Nobody knows.

And that's partly why rapid habitat loss

and mass extinction events are so

alarming, because we don't even know

how many species we're losing.

[music playing]

Christian and I have traveled throughout the Amazon basin,

and we've found some incredible things.

ROBERT OELMAN: How did I find Christian in the first place?

By chance?

I don't think so.

He has an understanding of this.

It's a kind of a spiritual kind of thing

that we're guided to find these things.

That's probably true.

We spend a lot of time and effort

looking for things that very few people are looking for.

GAVIN SVENSON: In the early days of natural history,

the people that were doing insect taxonomy

were people that could go, and get on a ship,

and spend three or four weeks getting to a location

to see an environment and be able to sample

that environment.

We can be there in a few hours now on an airplane,

so field photography has become more

and more paramount and goes hand-in-hand to systematic

biology.

Maybe somebody takes a picture of something that's

never been photographed before.

And then 10 years later somebody else takes a picture,

but in a different context.

Over time you start to accrue pictures of the same species

in different contexts, and different environments,

and doing different things.

And really, you can imagine a time

when you can look back over 200 or 300 years

of photographic documentation.

Seeing the real specimen is great.

But seeing a photo of the specimen,

you can reach millions of people.

ROBERT OELMAN: I think that there

is a path that's given to us.

I believe our purpose is to find and document as many

of these strange and beautiful insects as possible.

You see that?

We find so many different types and species of insects,

but one of the most captivating are the mantids.

One thing they do that no other insect does

is that they can rotate their head from side to side.

And one gets the feeling that they can be looking at you

and studying you as you are looking at them.

When you hold them in your hand, they look back at you.

Why they're doing that...

they're predators.

When you look at a spider creeping along a tree trunk,

it is not doing anything that we do

or we think of as human behaviors, types of movement.

But mantids seemed to have captured or embodied that sort

of predatory aspect of perceiving the environment just

a little bit more.

They feel comfortable hanging upside down under leaves

when they're all bunched up.

When I take a photo of a mantis in that position,

it's hard to make them out.

The texture and the color merges with all

the leaves around them.

GAVIN SVENSON: Survival for many of these groups

depends on their ability to blend in.

It's not so much them crafting themselves.

It's they are crafted by the environment.

You have, for example, green leaf mantids.

They look just like leaves with veins.

You have bark mantids living in tree trunks.

These characters evolve through natural selection.

And they are hard to find, because they

are really difficult to see.

GAVIN SVENSON: You have birds.

You have lizards.

You have monkeys.

You have lots of other different animals.

They're all gunning for you.

They all want to eat you.

It's this whole environmental shaping

that seems to have driven a lot of diversity

within praying mantids.

His

ROBERT OELMAN: The gray, dark brown... that's mostly gray.

It's really hard to see, so he's...

he knows his best defense is not to move.

GAVIN SVENSON: Photography really

has a focusing capability.

And if you want to diagnose this species from that species,

photography allows you to focus in to the particular thing

that you're trying to communicate

about the uniqueness of that species.

ROBERT OELMAN: Get the face.

Can you get the face?

OK.

I got the face!

All of these photographs and images

can really help us to understand so much more about what

these things are doing.

No, but look at the color, you know, the color on the abdomen.

Well, that's what I'm trying to do, you know,

just show the spectacular creation

that happens in the insect world so people understand it's

not just elephants and lions.

I mean, there are all kinds of creatures that are equally as

special that have been here a long time

and have undergone amazing evolution.

And they deserve our respect and protection.

A few years ago, I realized finding the insects

and taking the photos was just half the job.

I started seeing that this is something that would be

good to show many people, so many people

can see this and learn about what's really out there.

For that reason, you know, I started

creating the website so that people can really see this.

And it started.

More and more people, they're seeing the photos.

They're making comments.

But still, it's a small amount of people.

And I started looking for ways to get the word out

to a bigger audience.

BRUCE STEIN: The power of those images

to display these amazing creatures

and their evolutionary adaptations

are really going to be critical, because until you value

something, you're not going to really see meaningful action

to protect it.

DOUGLAS INKLEY: Every habitat has a wide diversity

of species in it.

And what's really interesting is that every one of those species

is important for that habitat.

If you were to think about all of those species

as individual bricks in a home, and let's say that you take

one brick out of the home, oh, OK, the home still functions,

but probably not as well.

A little bit of cold air gets in.

You take another break, gets a little bit worse.

You keep on going.

What eventually happens?

The house falls down.

ROBERT OELMAN: We have to assume that many insects are

being lost, because the habitat is being lost.

Human beings are actually destroying

animals at a very fast rate.

All these other animals feed primarily on insects.

Many species will be lost before people

ever know that they've existed.

Got you now.

That's a good one.

The photos really, they have a message.

To me, the message is, we're special creatures.

We're special creatures, and we've

been around for a long time.

They're much more advanced, much more

intelligent than people know.

To me, it's important to show that, because they represent,

as human beings do, the creations of the life force

that's in everything.

It's something we should respect.

What I try to do now is to not only show

that the insects exist but to put it in a context,

in a field of light, that really is an artistic composition.

How does one get an artistic eye?

When I think about it, this has been

developing over years and years, seeing, just seeing things.

Try to make this insect photography into an art form,

so I thought of ways to combine photos.

You can see the insect.

You can see how it blends into the background.

Then I look at the best images that I

have for a certain insect, and I try to think of a concept

how to present that.

[music playing]

I like the idea of composites, because you can see,

for example, there is one of a certain katydid

that opens its wings and looks like a moth.

Right?

So then there's one composite where you see it

from the front, when its wings are open from the back;

and from the side; and then when its wings are closed.

What Robert's work does is it's

an entryway for many people that maybe don't know very

much about tropical forests or don't

know very much about insects.

It's so fascinating and captures your fascination

and your imagination that you want to learn more.

ROBERT OELMAN: But first I was just happy to take the photos

and enjoy doing that.

But after a while, I realized, you know, this

is something really that should be...

should be seen by other people.

About that the same time, I received a invitation to have

a gallery show in New York.

SUZANNE PELLETIER: Hi, I'm Suzanne Pelletier,

I'm executive director of the Rainforest Foundation.

Thank you so much for coming tonight.

Gonna be a great way to showcase Robert's work to people

that not only are supporters, that are not only art lovers,

but also really care about the subject of Robert's work...

these beautiful, beautiful insects

and the forest where they live.

When you see this, these are the most

fantastic, strangest, most beautiful things you can find.

It's extremely difficult to find these,

because they don't want to be found.

You know, at this show, I'm nervous,

because I'm not used to talking about, really, the work.

I'm just a person that's in action.

OK. I'm in action.

I'm taking photos.

I'm working on the photos, and so on, and so forth.

I'm not talking.

Uh, my name is Robert Oelman.

I'm a photographer, insect hunter.

As I get more into the... into the flow,

I'm happy, because I'm sharing with other people.

And some of these people are genuinely interested.

Many of the people are.

So the thing about these, this is all very rare insects.

Depends.

This is 1 millimeter.

Oh my gosh.

ROBERT OELMAN: It's a katydid that looks like a leaf.

And this is one of the more perfect ones.

When you put yourself in a certain state

of mind and then this...

then the ideas just... they just come out.

He thinks these pictures are wonderful

and that people will like to see them, not because he took them

and these are wonderful things that he did.

But look at these wonderful things that there are.

And I want to share them with you.

ROBERT OELMAN: So this starts here.

It's all bunched up here.

Yeah.

ROBERT OELMAN: So nobody knows that it's a insect.

So the telltale sign of what it is is the shape of the head.

So that's a mantis.

How could this be?

I mean, this is some kind of...

what you learn is something about evolution.

You learn about the nature of life itself.

This is Colombia and jungles in Colombia.

And others are from Peru and Ecuador.

ELIZABETH OELMAN: He's very open,

and that openness is, I think, a very rare thing.

So... and I do this, and I just feel like a young person.

So does everybody know what a treehopper is?

GROUP: No.

WOMAN 3: No idea.

ROBERT OELMAN: These are treehoppers.

These have been around for 40 million years...

WOMAN 4: Wow.

ROBERT OELMAN:... much longer than human beings.

My brother has become centered.

That is, he has discovered something that he loves.

He likes doing it.

He feels fulfilled.

And he's getting recognition.

And that is really a

ROBERT OELMAN: I get a lot of satisfaction from it.

I'm working on this day and night

and trying to communicate with a lot of people.

It's a great job.

Thanks for coming. I mean, there's a lot of people.

That's great.

[applause]

What I'm looking at now and what I see are,

in the insects or the animals, they're all like little people.

They're not so different from us.

As I see that, I feel more empathy for them.

[music playing]

[speaking Spanish]

Yeah, I know.

You see everything, right?

You see everything, OK.

When you know what's here, you want to kill it?

Or do you want to preserve it?

You got to make a choice.

If you don't make a choice, you're

going in the direction of, OK, let's kill all these things

and not be conscious that we're doing that.

I'm just doing my part.

Whatever that force is is saying,

well, you get a job to do.

And do it.

And do it well, so people will notice.

Let's be conscious of what exists here

and then not kill them, not kill the insects,

not kill all the animals, not kill the forests.

[music playing]

I'm a part of nature.

I'm just part of the life force and

trying to do something that will create

more harmony in the world.

Hopefully, working together with more and more people,

we can preserve nature for future generations...

for our children, for our grandchildren, and all

those yet to come.

[music playing]

[MUSIC PLAYING - ALIXCIA, "ALL OF IT"]