Macro Photography By Thomas Shahan

Tulsa native Thomas Shahan’s popular online photography zooms in on some of Oklahoma’s most microscopic creatures for rare and dynamic close-ups. In photos by art student Thomas Shahan, you are looking into the eyes of, for example, a Thiodina puerpera. Black bristles sprouted like eyelashes above massive metallic green eyes. A smaller pair of eyes bracketed the big ones like punctuation marks. The head was the color of a smoggy sunset, while the biting gear looked like corroded copper.
“There’s another Scotty dog,” his grandmother would say, and sure enough, there it would go scooting up the wall in jerky little leaps. "Sometimes we’d see one on the screen door, a moth in its mouth. It looked like a diner startled in the act of wiping his mouth on a folded napkin. These 'dogs' were jumping spiders. With their big eyes and fangs that dangled like mustaches, they looked like tiny terriers. As a kid fascinated with bugs, I stared at a lot of jumping spiders. Recently, though, I came closer to them than I ever had before."