They haven’t invented the hipster filter yet that can match a rainy day bus window.
I remember reading somewhere about a school of philosophical thought which holds that there can be no art without the resistance of the medium — that the art is in the difficulty the artist overcomes when trying to make the medium express his or her message.
I don’t know that I buy the idea, but I do notice that my cell phone camera doesn’t have a very broad color or contrast palette, so it tends to blow out highlights and lose shadow detail — and that I’m starting to recognize opportunities to exploit those weaknesses:
From my flash new company phone:
When you count cells, you often mix them with a dilute solution of a dye which is excluded by living cells but can cross the membrane of dead cells — this allows you to count viable and dead cells separately. Probably the most common dye for the purpose (at least, the only one I’ve ever used) is Trypan blue, which is a very pretty blue color.
Everyone has their own ways of adding the dye; I tend to recycle the lid of a discarded culture dish as a mixing surface, pipetting 10 µl of 2X Trypan blue in buffered salt solution onto the lid and then mixing with 10 µl of cell suspension. Since the cell counter only takes 10 µl, that leaves half of each mixture drying in spots all over the lid as I count my way through my cultures.
One day I decided to take some photomicrographs of the resulting patterns. The crystals are salts; I think the dye tends to dry into blobs rather than crystallizing. The round things that look like alien eggs in images 2 and 3 are what was left behind by air bubbles.
I was reminded today, by Björn’s post about modern art, of something I’ve been meaning to post for a long time. I’m hardly the first person to notice that the products and by-products of scientific experiments can be very pretty, and I find that often the story and the science behind the object or image gives it an extra dimension. For instance this:
Being unemployed is not all bad. I like having time to make pictures.