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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."
Some of those were pretty nice shots.
The children's stuff was even more impressive - I particularly liked the bursting baloon!
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
See also: The Lennart Nilsson Award
that someone just wanted to say "panspermia."
From now on I'll have to check each pea I eat for pea weevils.
End transmission.
There are a bunch of beautiful visualizations at this site http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2005/show/ssin tro.dtl
I must have overslept, for just yesterday I thought it was October 21 and there were still 10 more weeks left in 2005!
Simpsons 1F17 [Diorama-rama Day]:
... Let's have a look.
Skinner:
[quietly to Miss Hoover] Get the ribbon ready.
[pulls sheet off]
Oh...a little...sterile...no _real_ insight. What do you
think, Miss Hoover?
Hoover: Ehh.
Skinner: Ooh, now we're into the dregs. Here's Ralph Wiggum's entry.
[pulls sheet off]
Pre-packaged "Star Wars" characters, still in their display
box? Are those the limited-edition action figures?
Ralph: What's a diorama?
Skinner: Why it's Luke, and Obi-Wan, and my favorite, Chewie! They're
all here! [to Miss Hoover] What do you think?
Hoover: [bored] I think it's lunch time.
Skinner: We have a winner!
One simple rule for its versus it's
over and over again... "Coloured using Adobe Photoshop". "Science" and "Photoshop" do not go together. Does the public need even more reason to distrust science?
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?
I love trying to take close up photos, like this one http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=52264740&c ontext=set-1132411&size=l or this one http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=52265385&c ontext=set-1132411&size=l (he's actually starting to spin the web on this one) using my Sony DSC F828 (these are 50% the actual size for flickr). It's amazing the detail you can get.
Anyone have their own site with closeups? What camera are you using?
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
I always find it interesting how the visual arts community attempts to capture the reality of the world based on the known principles of their day. Looking back through history at the artist rendering of our world provides us with a unique perspective on how wrong we were in describing the world in art.
Art is all about expressing ideas or concepts visually-- Certain portions of the world of science, especially quantum mechanics, are just too weird for us to capture in visual display. Perhaps it will take someone like Dali or Escher to provides us with a view of the quantum world.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I figured there would be millions of folks posting "What about this picture"...but maybe I underestimated /. readers!
Best Buy can have you arrested
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.
How I would shoot this photo:
Note the blobs on the bottom are air bubbles that have floated to the surface.