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The Best Science Photographs of 2005
Hogwash McFly writes "This year's Visions Of Science Photographic Awards have honored several amazing snapshots in the realm of science photography. Photographs were each judged in one of ten categories, and winning images range from a sinister cancer cell to the use of eggs to illustrate panspermia. The full list of winners and runners up is featured on the official website, and there are larger versions of the winners over at the Beeb and at National Geographic."
See also: The Lennart Nilsson Award
There are a bunch of beautiful visualizations at this site http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2005/show/ssin tro.dtl
For those too lacking in curiosity to browse through the other neat photos, here's the pea weevil
Notice that most of the photos were artificially colored.
The contest seems to be public relations advertising. It is supported by Novartis, a pharmaceutical company that perhaps should not be trusted completely: Kindness, or maximizing shareholder value?
Tell me about it. During a tour of Hubble control and image processing at Johns Hopkins I was given a sneak preview of the photo that was being prepped for public release as THE symbolic 15th anniversary photo (some spiral galaxy that was admittedly breathtaking.)
The "prep" involved touching it up with Photoshop. Disappointing to say the least.
Science and Photoshop (or whatever other image processing method) goes very well together. The purpose of the pictures is to show something. Drawing an arrow in the picture or colouring an interesting structure is the same thing. Even laymen might have heard of e.g. Gram colouring of bacteria in light microscopy (even if they don't know that all scanning electron micrographs are really in grayscale and a HIV virion isn't Dangerously Red in reality...).
What doesn't go together, IMO, is photographic awards and Photoshop! The "enhancement" wasn't even limited to coloured SE-micrographs, there are even pure photo montages and screendumps!
It's a "purdy picshurs" award.
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Used correctly for scientific purposes, Photoshop is little more than giving artificial coloring to the subject. Scientific photographs and images do this _all_the_time_. Ever see an image from an electron microscope? Photographs/images of just about anything cellular? All artificially colored, either through use of dyes or photoshop techniques. The reason for artificial coloring is to aid in visually distinguishing between different parts/whatever. That's not to say sometimes they don't go overboard, just to make it look pretty, but if they're using photoshop to accurately describe/represent what's actually there (or what they hypothesize is actually there to make it easier to peer review), then I'd say that's fine.
It's not the camera, its the lens that enables macro photography. What you really need to look for is a good macro lens. And most any digital SLR will give you great quality, since you don't seem to have a particular preference beyond "macro photos".
.co.uk website if you haven't RTFM. With each image's caption there is a small bit of text which describes the equipment used to take the shot.
However, don't expect to be taking pictures of things like the peppercorn & sea salt, or the mosquitos, or any of the ones that involved polarized light as seen on the website, those were taken with the aid of a microscope. Also, look on the
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