Photo 365 - Day 252 (Juicy Magma)

Day 252 (March 12th, 2011)
Title: Juicy Magma

Watermelon, while quite tasty, isn't very photogenic.  I took about 200 photos of the melon before blending it into YumJuice (TM) (C), but many of the photos were just not that good - and because I'm a "professional" - I totally blame the watermelon.  The external texture/coloring is nice, but nothing amazing (I have one more watermelon photo for tomorrow of the exterior skin), and the inside is basically red.  Nothing really amazing about red.  It's red. Not much to play with when all you have is just red.  And I tried to get some photos with the seeds, thinking they would help with depth and contrast.  I was wrong.  Just red.

I finally got this photo of the "cross-section" of the melon and when I saw it, it reminded me of my old grade-school science books trying to describe the different layers of the Earth.  When I saw this, I though: "Hey, science class would have been more fun with tasty fruit examples!"... So, the next time I teach kids about the Earth's crust and layers, this will be my fruit of choice!

Enjoy!

Photo 365 - Day 242 (Swing)

Day 242 (March 2nd, 2011)
Title: Swing

Yesterday's photo was "Impact" - that split second just before the club hit the ball and sent it into orbit.  Today's shot is about 3 nanoseconds before - the moment when the swing is furthest out and you can 'see' all of the energy that is building up in the club just before it starts to head down.  Golf - Physics In Action! 

Enjoy!

Photo 365 - Day 50 (DNA kinda) and Weekly Hindsight

Day 50 (August 23rd, 2010)
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!

Photo 365 - Day 49 (Crystallization)

Day 49 (August 22th, 2010)
Title: Crystallization

First of all, I am not amused with Comcast having a total "blackout" outage for the last 30 hours or so.  No cable, no phone, and most importantly, no Internet!  So, I've had this shot ready to go for a day and a half, so without further ado, its Crystallization! (My "Weekly Hindsight" post and photo will be tomorrow)

I actually started planning for this shot last Tuesday, due to the fact on how long it takes to make sugar crystals.  Making the crystals isn't too difficult, you need about 1 cup hot water and 3-4 cups of sugar.  Mix both until you have a solution that is super-saturated with sugar and pour into a shallow dish.  As it evaporates, sugar crystals will form.  Keep breaking the top "shell" that forms so the water vapors can escape and you will get a nice colony of crystals on the bottom of the dish.  I would recommend using a food coloring agent when mixing the hot water and sugar because otherwise you get white/opaque crystals that are hard to photograph (I had to shoot in RAW format to be able to correct some lighting issues). Salt crystals (which can be made the same way) have similar issues. 

Now, you can do a lot of things with sugar crystal when you are done with them, including: Making rock candy (wait till they completely dry), when they are still forming you can add a flavor to get something like "coffee sugar", or just grind it back up into sugar for your cereal! 

Photo 365 - Day 46 (Combustion)

Day 46 (August 18th, 2010)
Title: Combustion


Continuing with my Science Theme for this week, today I thought I'd tackle combustion!  Now, as much fun as it would be to blow things up, I saw three small flaws with that plan: 1) Don't want to damage the camera, 2) Getting C-4 explosives is a bit harder than one would think, and 3) I don't think our insurance covers 'self-inflicted explosion'. 


My thought was to catch a match just as it reaches critical ignite temperature and take a shot.  Wow, does that sound simple when I type it, but in actual practice it was waaaaaay more annoying.  Lets just say, that a match ignites very quickly.  I think I went through 2 boxes of matches and two, 4GB memory cards and after I was done, I have about 10-15 shots that are worth keeping.  I was also trying to get as close as possible to the flame without damaging my lens, so until I can make a fireproof glass barrier, I think this is about as close as I'm willing to risk.  I hope you enjoy it.

Photo 365 - Day 45 (Solubility)

Day 45 (August 17th, 2010)
Title: Solubility


Today's picture was a LOT trickier than I thought it would be to take.  The basic concept was; photograph a "solution", such as 'salt + water = saltwater'.  Tried a lot of salt.  Lets just say it was tricky to shoot.  I thought, hey, food coloring into water is also an example of a solution (water is the solvent and the dye is the solute).  This also turned out to be quite a difficult undertaking.  First of all, the dye quickly dilutes completely in the water making it impossible to "shoot" the solubility of the two items.  Second, placing one small drop of dye (or two, or even three!) in a glass of water and trying to shoot it with a macro lens is not fun!  Macro doesn't really work well with a large depth-of-field needed to really get the "waves" and "ebbs" of the dye moving through the water.  Using a normal (prime) lens wouldn't let me really get close enough to accurately show what I pictured in my mind.  After (literally) about 800 shots, I got this one.  It wasn't what I originally had in mind, but after looking at it for a while, I've decided that I quite like it.  So, I can now scratch "solubility" off my science list!  At least, until I can think of a better way to shoot it. :-)

Photo 365 - Day 44 (Vibration)

Day 44 (August 16th, 2010)
Title: Vibration

This week, I'm trying to show some "scientific principles" in my photos.  I'm not sure how well they will come out, but I'm pleased with this first one.  The first one is "Vibration" - mechanical oscillations about an equilibrium point.  (Thank you Wikipedia for that lovely definition).