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The Best Science Photographs of 2005 68

Posted by CowboyNeal from the worth-a-thousand dept.
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."
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The Best Science Photographs of 2005 More

The Best Science Photographs of 2005

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  • Some Impressive Shots (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RapidEye ( 322253 )
    Some of those were pretty nice shots.
    The children's stuff was even more impressive - I particularly liked the bursting baloon!

  • Nilsson? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22, 2005 @09:50AM (#13852323)
    See also: The Lennart Nilsson Award [rit.edu]

  • We all know (Score:3)

    by Spetiam ( 671180 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @09:55AM (#13852345) Journal
    that someone just wanted to say "panspermia [daviddarling.info]."

  • I thought the "Concepts" winner was pretty weak (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Seemed to be much more art than science. Eggs falling into water to represent panspermia. At least the others had some relation to more hard science. I liked the ion channel the best. Seemed vaguely like a mushroom cloud. Had many elements of art along with hard science.

    • Art is a good way to explain... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @11:03AM (#13852596) Homepage
      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 [symmetrymagazine.org], are just too weird for us to capture in visual display. Perhaps it will take someone like Dali [dali-gallery.com] or Escher [mcescher.com] to provides us with a view of the quantum world.

  • Great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by evil agent ( 918566 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @09:59AM (#13852357)
    From now on I'll have to check each pea I eat for pea weevils.

  • Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge (Score:5, Informative)

    by gourneau ( 769571 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:02AM (#13852365) Homepage
    There are a bunch of beautiful visualizations at this site http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2005/show/ssin tro.dtl [sciencemag.org]

  • Huh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) * on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:08AM (#13852385) Homepage Journal
    I must have overslept, for just yesterday I thought it was October 21 and there were still 10 more weeks left in 2005!

  • strictly Parade Magazine material, no insight (Score:3, Funny)

    by ChrisCampbell47 ( 181542 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:15AM (#13852413)
    Simpsons 1F17 [Diorama-rama Day]:

    Skinner: ... Let's have a look.
                      [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!

  • Photographs? More like Photoshops (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:37AM (#13852497)
    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?

    • Re:Photographs? More like Photoshops (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Tell me about it. During a tour of Hubble control and image processing at Johns Hopkins I was given a sneak preview of the photo that was being prepped for public release as THE symbolic 15th anniversary photo (some spiral galaxy that was admittedly breathtaking.)

      The "prep" involved touching it up with Photoshop. Disappointing to say the least.

    • Re:Photographs? More like Photoshops (Score:4, Informative)

      by Seehund ( 86897 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @11:41AM (#13852750) Homepage Journal
      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.

    • 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
    • What color is IR in your world?

  • Artificially colored (Score:5, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:41AM (#13852510) Homepage
    Notice that most of the photos were artificially colored.

    The contest seems to be public relations advertising. It is supported by [visions-of-science.co.uk] Novartis, a pharmaceutical company that perhaps should not be trusted completely: Kindness, or maximizing shareholder value? [slashdot.org]
    • Since many of them were taken with techniques insensitive to color, why does this surprise you?

      Most of the photographs in your biology and neuroscience textbooks are artificially colorized [what, you think that when your brain gets very active, it also gets very red? =) ].

      • what, you think that when your brain gets very active, it also gets very red? =)

        Yes. Brain activity requires increased blood flow to support its metabolism. This actually does change the color of the brain (more red in fact) and allows near infrared imaging through the skull to actually detect this change in color which can be correlated with activity.
        • Doesn't the "near infrared imaging" pick up the increased heat in those areas of the brain with increased blood flow? Doesn't that data then get artificially coloured in to represent the increased blood flow in an understandable way to us humans?
          • yes, the imaging you're talking about is called metabolic mapping. radioactive labels are placed on otherwise normal glucose molecules, and as those glucose molecules make their way to placed they're required (i.e., places of high activity), the presence of their radioactive tracer is mapped using the emission of annihilation photons. At least, in PET scanning. In other forms, like 2-deoxy-glucose mapping, other techniques are used to basically study the same thing.

            the images are then colorized, usually usi
          • No. that would be infrared imaging. N-IR imaging is actually looking at absorbance of oxy vs. deoxy hemoglobin. Wavelength absorbance=color you are actually looking at how red the brain is.
      • When someone picks beautiful colors, the photo becomes partly art.

        The implication is that people wouldn't be interested in straight science.
        • When someone picks beautiful colors, the photo becomes partly art.

          The implication is that people wouldn't be interested in straight science.

          True, but scientific photos are often colorized or frequency-shifted for valid scientific reasons. The human eye and the brain behind it are very good as spotting complex patterns in visual data. So mapping data into a 2-D image in the human visual range can be a fast way to spot the interesting features (that may then be analyzed in more detail by software).

          Thus, the
          • I fully agree. The problem here is that Novartis [novartis.com] is presenting the photos more for their beauty than for their scientific information. That insults the thinking that goes into science. The real beauty of science is the thinking, not pretty pictures.

            The whole thing is probably designed by a public relations agency to get free publicity for Novartis. Probably there is no one at the P.R. agency who has any interest in or respect for scientific investigation. However, that theory means that Novartis is out o
    • In most scientific application light is not the data that is being captured, hence there is no color. There are limitation of the resolving power of a light-microscope. In this case, some of the pictures are from electron-microscope, which are hundreds of thosands of times magnified, since electron microscope doesn't use to light it doesn't have color.

      In fact, most powerful microscopes use a computer as an interface for viewing. The application also displayed artifically colored images to display informa
    • What about this first place picture [visions-of-science.co.uk]? It sure could of had its own corporate backing. I can see it now.

      "It looks like you're trying to take an award winning science photograph. Would you like some help?"
  • Slashdotted in under 20 comments. And it's a photo gallery, which makes it even worse.

  • Great macro camera? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Barkley44 ( 919010 )
    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 [flickr.com] or this one http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=52265385&c ontext=set-1132411&size=l [flickr.com] (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?
    • So a $1,000 camera or so will get you that kind of detail? For years I have just wanted the ability to take close-ups with such detail, but didn't know which camera would give me that (without paying too much, too).

      Got any camera suggestions under the $1,000 range to take pictures like that? Thanks!

      • It's not the camera, its the lens that enables macro photography. What you really need to look for is a good macro lens. And most any digital SLR will give you great quality, since you don't seem to have a particular preference beyond "macro photos".

        However, don't expect to be taking pictures of things like the peppercorn & sea salt, or the mosquitos, or any of the ones that involved polarized light as seen on the website, those were taken with the aid of a microscope. Also, look on the .co.uk website i
      • What good is detail if the photo ends up getting posted on the web the size of a postage stamp? I swear, people who develop news articles STILL don't have a clue. My monitor has 1920x1200 pixels. By showing an image a 100'th of that area is ridiculus.

    • Re:Great macro camera? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Vegigami ( 32659 )
      Here's a couple I've taken with a Nikon Coolpix 950.

      This is one of the tiny snails that appear on my sidewalk after it rains. I was using the silver dollar as a platform.

      http://members.iglou.com/mbl/snail0.jpg [iglou.com]

      This is a very small flower I snapped in Dana Meadows which is just before you leave Yosemite National Park through the Tioga Pass gate. (I didn't know the small beetle on the left was there til I saw the picture.)

      http://members.iglou.com/mbl/tinyblue.jpg [iglou.com]

      Pretty amazing detail.

  • What!? (Score:4, Funny)

    by callipygian-showsyst ( 631222 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @11:12AM (#13852639) Homepage
    I figured there would be millions of folks posting "What about this picture" [wikipedia.org]...but maybe I underestimated /. readers!
  • How Paul Rapson managed to pull off "Worship"? That photo is amazing!

    • How I would shoot this [visions-of-science.co.uk] photo:

      • An aquarium full of water
      • white background
      • light the scene from the bottom
      • drop blue ink in
      • shoot away until you get an interesting shape
      • display the photo upside down (so it looks like the ink is rising)

      Note the blobs on the bottom are air bubbles that have floated to the surface.

    • Ink, either based on oil or alcohol, is lighter than water. But once it reaches certain velocity, floating up, it introduces more whirls and water starts slowing it down. Actually, it's hardly different from cigarette smoke...
  • http://www.visions-of-science.co.uk/f-2005winners. htm [visions-of-science.co.uk]
    that's just plain nasty I could of gone my whole life not knowing this, and been all the happier for it. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

  • This [visions-of-science.co.uk] is my favorite, the deformation of the water due to a clip's weight.

    It made me remember something... when you hold a small thing (like a clip) very near your eye (so it blurs), the images you see in the background bends near the borders of the object... why?

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