The streets in Bangalore, India, are incredibly crowded with all the hustle and bustle of a city: trucks, scooters, and a teeming mass of people, all gushing like water through a narrow canyon. After photographing in these conditions for five days, 12 to 14 hours at a time, going back and relaxing at the Taj West End Hotel was a real pleasure. It’s this great, British colonial-style hotel, where everything is done immaculately. The rooms weren’t overly large, but each one had a veranda that overlooked sculptured lawns and palm trees. I had never seen anything like it before. You could hardly say I was roughing it.

I was with Cornell scientist Elson Shields and his fleet of radio-controlled airplanes in Ithaca, New York. We had just finished flying planes that are used to monitor pollen drift when Shields decided to do one more flight. From there I just remember watching his plane go up and down, then nose dive into the ground, where it exploded into pieces. Standing there and knowing his plane was a goner was the worst. It took him 40 hours of gluing and pasting to get it back together.

I took my camera and got inside a cage with about 60 monarch butterflies while the scientists who were studying them stood on the outside looking in. Taking pictures of these butterflies was no small feat. They landed on my camera, nose, glasses, and my bald head. I tried to pluck them off by carefully grabbing their back wings, but butterflies can be pretty tenacious.