Cover. With a little help even the most uninteresting of workplace materials can be turned into a kaleidoscope of dazzling colours. The laboratory plastics displayed here have been lit to take advantage of the birefringence properties of the clear bodies and so as to form a contrast with the opaque flask caps, lit using spectral light. Lance Tomlinson joined the Royal Air Force as a photographer at the age of 15. After working as an industrial photographer he now works as an in-house photographer at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, where he has been for the last 10 years. The image was captured using a Mamiya RZ67 camera and a PhaseOne camera back.