Percy Smith extracting a flower

A photograph (silver gelatin print) on page 147 of F Percy Smith's scapbook showing F Percy Smith and his wife Kate working in their home laboratory, 6 May 1939. Taken by an unnamed photographer for Illustrated magazine.

Frank Percy Smith was a pioneer of nature photography, revealing the hidden lives of insects and plants in a way that people had never seen before. His close-up of the fly’s tongue as it drank was extraordinary. When film producer Charles Urban saw Smith’s close up photographs of flies drinking, he engaged him to make natural history films, which he continued to do for the next 35 years.

Smith worked with his wife Kate and their friend Phyllis Bolté in their home studio. They documented the growth of plants using time-lapse photography, so revealing the slow movements of plants for the first time.