Spring flowers

I promised a new picture by the end of this week, but a series of evening storms this week has kept me from getting out with my camera. Additionally, we still aren't completely unpacked, and we've got family in town. It all adds up to no new shots.

To placate the masses, I offer a shot I took this spring instead. These flowers were in UNC's Coker Arboretum, a quiet corner of the Chapel Hill campus. I love the flowers, and I like the shot, although I should've plucked the green blade in the background, which distracts from the intended subject.

From the picture album: Pacific Coast

It's been a crazy week here in North Carolina as we move from Chapel Hill to Durham. As a result, I've had no time for photography and little time for blog updates. Hopefully, I'll have a chance to get out to take some shots of the full moon later this week. If I get anything good, I'll get them up here.

In the meantime, here's a shot that I took with my old Olympus when we were in California in October, 2005. This view can be found just north of Santa Cruz. It's a short walk on a trail from a nondescript parking lot on Highway 1. The day I took this shot, views were hard to come by in Northern California due to dense fog. However, at this region of the coast, everything opened up, and the views were spectacular.

From the picture album: Pilot Mountain II

This is another shot that I took at Pilot Mountain in December 2006. It's a closeup of the the southwest face of Big Pinnacle.

While Big Pinnacle is certainly a signature North Carolina site, it's perhaps less of a destination. A trail encircles the base of Big Pinnacle, but climbing is not allowed, meaning that one can't actually summit Pilot Mountain. Even so, the views atop the lookouts on Pilot are stunning, and if your heart is set on summiting a rocky peak in the northern Piedmont, you can always take a short drive down the road to Hanging Rock State Park, which is best known for another monadnock, Moore's Knob, with a moderate trail to the top.

From the picture album: Pilot Mountain I

I took this shot in December, 2006 soon after my wife gave me a tripod for Christmas.

Pilot Mountain is one of the more dramatic geological features in North Carolina. Compared to the peaks found in the Black Mountains, Pilot's 2421 ft. elevation is modest. However, because Pilot Mountain is surrounded by miles of relatively flat farm land and pasture, this rocky prominence is striking. When most North Carolinians think of Pilot, they think of it's larger pinnacle, called "Big Pinnacle", which is the subject of this photograph.

There are a few interesting features in this particular shot. First, in the background you can see two other mountains in the front range, Sauratown Mountain and Hanging Rock. Second, near to the top of the photo, I was able to capture the early evening moon. This weekend, I will post another Pilot Mountain photo taken the same day.

Butterfly in the garden

This is another picture that I took on Saturday after my digital photography class. It was a difficult shot, because the subject wasn't particularly cooperative. I spent about 15 minutes chasing him around the garden but never got the perfect shot. This image is probably the best one that I did get. The backdrop is good (intensely green foliage with flowers), and I almost caught him with his wings fully extended... but not quite.

I used the following settings for the picture:

Shutter speed: 1/500 sec
Aperture: f5
ISO: 64
Flash: None

In retrospect, I wish that I had used a higher f stop to increase my depth of field. I also might've been able to remove some of the shadows with a flash. Unfortunately, you don't always get a chance to reshoot when you're dealing with a live subject.

Bee on a flower

This morning I took an introductory digital photography class with Melissa Southern, a Raleigh-based photographer. It was an absolutely fabulous course, and I learned a tremendous amount. I don't know that I am a better photographer now, but I am certainly a more educated one.

Some of the more interesting lessons dealt with macro photography, which essentially refers to close up images. I've always enjoyed macro photography... even before I knew what it was called. However, I didn't know how to utilize any of my camera's features to facilitate those kinds of shots.

This is a shot that I took as I was leaving the workshop. The shot was taken at the NC State University Arboretum. The shutter speed was 1/500 sec, the aperture was set to f4.5, and the ISO setting was 64. I set the white balance to sunny, and utilized the camera's macro focus feature for close images.

Becoming a better photographer

This morning, I'm off to digital photography workshop in Raleigh. Hopefully, I'll return a more sophisticated photographer. My main goal for the course is to learn to use many of the features that I currently neglect on my camera (aperture, shutter speed, ISO settings, etc.). Additionally, I regularly see the shot I should've taken after returning home and viewing the shots I did take. Perhaps with better understanding, I'll begin to "see" those shots before I leave the site.

Science as art final installment: A closer look at a controversial topic

For my final photo in this "science as art" series, I thought I'd try something different. This image is not as visually striking as the two previous ones, and I guess that calls into question whether it's really art at all. But perhaps, what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up with relevance.

This picture is a colony of mouse embryonic stem cells. It's a shot that my wife, Stephanie, and I teamed together to produce. My contribution was simply preparing the cells; she actually snapped the shot.

Typically, my tendency is to avoid controversy. I am notoriously poor at dealing with conflict. However, it occurs to me that most people with strong opinions on both sides of the "stem cell debate" have actually never seen an embryonic stem cell. As a result, my intention is not to advocate for a particular position (in fact, I think that both sides tend to overstate and mislead). Rather, my intention is only to provide information, here in the form of a picture that might provide visitors a look at something they've never seen before.

Above, I referred to the image as a "colony of mouse embryonic stem cells." That's because embryonic stem cells grow as bundled groups of cells. The large ovalish object in this shot is one such colony. The individual embryonic stem cells are the smaller units in the larger blob.

More science as art: Filtered fluorescence

This is another picture taken at work. It's three views of the same nucleus, with different filters in place for each shot. On the far left, the filter eliminates all light other than blue light. In the middle, the filter eliminates all light but red light. The picture on the right is actually a digital merge of the two pictures on the left, although filters do exist that would allow you to view both colors.

The blue staining here is the same DNA stain that I used in the "chromosomes dividing" shot. The red stain is actually an antibody that is recognizing a particular chemical modifcation in these cells. What's interesting scientifically (and also artistically) is that the regions where the blue is most intense, the red is least intense (which becomes obvious in the merge on the right).

As you can probably gather from the last two blog entries, I love fluorescence microscopy. It produces not only scientifically-compelling data but also artistically-striking images.

I'll finish this week long feature on science as art with a final image on Thursday.

Science as art: Chromosomes dividing

I thought I'd try something a little different for this week by keeping all of my new shots on a "science as art" theme.

This is a shot I took at work a few years ago on a fluorescence microscope. In the image, you are looking at the nuclei of mouse cells, which I have stained with a blue DNA dye called DAPI.

There are two nuclei in the middle of this shot. The one on the right is the nucleus of a normal, resting cell. The nucleus on the left, which looks kind of like two blobs close together, is in the middle of cell division. In technical terms, we'd say that we've captured this cell in anaphase of mitosis.

The blue strings in each blob in the nucleus on the left are the actual chromosomes, which are being pulled to two separate poles. Eventually, the cell membrane (which is invisible in this shot) would invaginate, and those two blue blobs from the cell on the left would become the nuclei of two new daughter cells (similar in appearance to the nondividing cell on the right).