DHAKA: Do fairies exist? Nor just in tales – is a question which was unsolved for many years. Recently a British professor is getting a swarm of attention for a series of photos depicting tiny creatures that he suggests look like fairies.
International newspapers published some of the photographs of John Hyatt, who lectures on art research at Manchester Metropolitan University, took the photos around Lancashire, UK on Monday.
John Hyatt entitled his collection as ‘Rossendale Fairies’. His photographs are now is on display at the Whitaker Museum in Rossendale, The Huffington Post mentioned.
The photographer introduced his photos as ‘People can decide for themselves what they are. The message to people is to approach them with an open mind,’ he said, according to the Mirror.
‘I think it’s one of those situations where you need to believe to see. A lot of people who have seen them say they have brought a little bit of magic into their lives and there’s not enough of that around.’
Hyatt said there that he spotted the tiny creatures after taking pictures at dusk.
‘I was just taking sunset through the trees and when I enlarged the photographs later in the studio, I saw these figures,’ he wrote.
‘They are not doctored apart from I increased the size of a detailed section of a larger photograph along with the DPI to stop them being just large pixels – normal size enhancement techniques,’ he added.
He commented that the creatures in his photos don’t look like normal insects.
‘It was a bit of a shock when I blew them up, I did a double take,’ he told the Manchester Evening News adding more, ‘I went out afterwards and took pictures of flies and gnats and they just don’t look the same’.
Hyatt’s photos have skeptics buzzing around him like flies. In fact, flies are what the photos actually show, according to one insect expert.
Entomologist Erica McLaughlin writes in the British Natural History Museum’s NaturePlus blog that the creatures that Hyatt photographed are most likely a small species of fly known as the ‘midge’.
‘These tiny midges form mating swarms where the males will ‘dance’ around trying to attract the opposite sex,’ she writes.
‘They have delicate wings and long legs which dangle down.’
But Hyatt isn’t worried about skeptics.
BDST: 1837 HRS, APR 08, 2014
