Title: DNA Kinda
This is the last in my weekly "science" based photos and I know its not technically DNA, but there are three key factors that I took it:
1) The coin is really cool (its a 2003 British 2 Pound coin celebrating the discovery of DNA)
2) Its a whole lot cheaper than getting a mass spectrometer or other scientific thingy that can "see" DNA
3) Its my wife's favorite coin.
Weekly Hindsight
This week was quite an experience! When I first thought of doing a science week, I really didn't think it would be so difficult to pull off! This is one of those times that I jumped into a project without really thinking out the details of how it was going to be accomplished.
One of the biggest problems that I started out with, was what scientific concepts do I use? I first asked many of my friends who are scientist what would be a good, simple, principle to show. This was an epically bad idea. Not the part about asking my friends, that was fine. The problem was asking scientist about science! As much as I appreciated some of their input (molecular bonds, genetic recoding and radioactivity), many of their suggestions were not really photograph-friendly and/or not "simple". So, I took what ideas I could from them and tried to make them as simple as possible.
Many of the photos came out quite a bit different than I had originally conceived of them, but in a good way. I particularly liked the Evaporation (water drop) and Solubility (food coloring in water) photos, because without any context they are very surreal photos that really make you wonder.
One little bit of advice I'm going to give this week: When you are taking shots in difficult lighting, I highly recommend using the RAW (+JPG) setting on your camera. The JPG compression settings can really lose a lot of the detail/feel of the shot when the lighting is less than perfect. With RAW, the camera just "dumps" all the data that it captured when the photo was taken and you can do whatever compression (via software like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom) you decide later. Just remember, RAW takes up a lot more space than JPG and requires you to do a little bit more work before you are ready to share your work. Keep in mind, even though RAW takes a little more room and time to get your perfect photo, its still a heck of a lot faster than developing your own prints in a darkroom. Having to mix all the chemicals, developing your film, making the print in the enlarger,then running the print through the chemicals, and then 40 min later realizing you are slightly out of focus on that print and you'll have to start again. So, a little RAW tweaking isn't so bad.
I have some more "weekly" ideas coming up, but I think I'll try and just shoot some random stuff this week to maybe spark some imagination. It was also fun this week because as of Sunday, I've had 1500 visitors to the blog. Either I've got one person who is stalking me, or I've actually gotten some folks reading this who aren't imaginary!
Nice photo, lovely swirls.
ReplyDeleteThank you much! I was difficult to find something that would show DNA and yet be interesting to look at. I was trying to avoid using a picture (or diagram) from a book, and was lucky to remember this coin! The other idea was using Whoppers (a chocolate-malt candy in the shape of little balls) and toothpicks to make a double helix.
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