Hi! My name is Martinho, but you can call me Martin.
When I was a kid, I had only one purpose in life. To go down to my auntie’s backyard to observe and play with ants, snails, spiders, millipedes, isopods and so on!
Well, not always… sometimes I would murder them as well, but let’s keep this between you and me.
I had a huge fascination for insects and could spend endless hours looking at them, but I never kept any, I simply didn’t know and back in the 1980’s there was no internet, so there was no way for me to ever find out how to ever keep insects.
So while growing up, I focused on other pets, like hamsters, birds, turtles, frogs, … and somehow, I started to forget about insects, just like Peter Pan.
It was only in my 30’s (late 2014) that I came across insects again, to find out and remember my lost childhood love for them. I was already living abroad, I had just captured a wild praying mantis, which I wanted to feed and I was roaming the city trying to find a pet shop that would sell live crickets, when I found this one shop, I went inside, and noticed that they had an exotic pet section, snakes, turtles, lizards, tarantulas, and then I saw her… A Myrmicaria brunnea queen inside a test tube!! I immediately called for help, and tried to get as much info as I could on how to keep the Queen, because I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass, She was coming home with me! And that was how I started keeping mantises and ants all of a sudden!
Now, almost 9 years later, I have a ton of insects… ants, cockroaches, mantids, tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, assassin bugs, isopods, beetles, and I am continuously studying and researching about how to keep even more!
The next projects will be Flower Beetles, Rhino Beetles, Moths, Butterflies and Amblypygi.
As for Photography, I always enjoyed taking photos, but never studied or spent much time at it, I would always shoot Automatic Mode, and just fire away only during my holidays, but few months in keeping insects, I started to use my DSLR to take photos of the insects I was keeping so I could post them on Facebook and slowly but surely, I started to study more about Macro Photography, since it was quite challenging, and that got me interested in all sorts of photographic genres, and that too was how I started my photographic journey!
So I hope you enjoy the variety of content, while we explore and share this world together !