Back in 2021, a couple of months after starting macro photography, I was out about half an hour from home, exploring a little bit of forest in a town called Jarrahdale, in Western Australia.

The session had started well, finding a very cute little spider, however it hadn’t hung around for long. Just long enough to get a couple of shots as it sat upon some pieces of gravel that dwarfed it’s tiny frame. We searched and searched for more, but there were no more to be found.

So, remembering that sometimes you have to sit still and let the wildlife come to you, I sat myself down next to a large area of leaf litter, and waited.

Nothing much moved. Except me that is, nearly jumping out of my skin when I thought that my hand was resting next to a large-ish huntsman spider. I was new to macro, still learning, and still jumpy. The huntsman didn’t move though, so I got braver, and attempted to take a photograph. It was only then that I realised that what I was sitting next to was in fact an empty moult. The spider was long gone, and what had made me jump was just it’s last set of clothes, abandoned as it grew out of them.

Then scanning through the leaf littler, a tiny dot of green caught my eye. I discounted it as being a nib of plant material, but on scanning again, it seemed to move. Maybe it was just my eyes, tired from the effort of looking for tiny things, but, looking once more, it seemed to move again. So I took a photograph to help me to see what it was I was looking at.

I took the photograph, went to review it, and my first thought was “there is an alien in my viewfinder”. A tiny green alien that sort of bobbed as it moved. I took some more photographs, still having no idea what it was, but being fascinated all the same.

The tiny green alien turned out to be a leafhopper nymph, and the two yellow adornments I realised were even tinier parasitic hitchhikers.

This early session taught me some valuable lessons - that sitting still and letting the wildlife come to you really does work, that not everything is fully visible to the naked eye and if you are not sure what you are looking at to take a photograph to check, and that small green aliens really do live among us.

I was already hooked, but realising that there was a whole world of creatures out there that I didn’t know existed and knew nothing about sealed the deal, and made me keener than ever to discover more.

Aliens Live Among Us

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