Creative science photography

Photography in science is a tricky business. 

Andrew Williston, curatorial assistant at Harvard's ichthyology collections, works with some of the best photography equipment possible-for photographing dead fish. He deals with delicate tissue, mold, and structures that collapse in the dry air, all for the sake of the Fish Imaging Project. The project revolves around photographing extremely sharp, clear digital images, and putting them on a searchable database.

Who would want to look at dead fish? Quite a lot of people, actually. According to Williston, scientists from all over the world needing a rare fish from Harvard's collection for their studies — and who are unable to fly around the world just to look at a dead fish — often rely on the Fish Imaging Project's photography for their analyses. Two points came to mind when he told me this:

1)      It's inspiring how technology can work with communication to make so many more scientific studies possible.

2)      Isn't it even more incredible how much we're seeing of the world through a camera lens?

Expanding on that second point...think about it. There are entire worlds out there, literally, that we have only seen because of the existence of photography. Most people are probably quite familiar with the nature photography of the National Geographic sort, that expands readers' visual experience to untouched rainforests, and deep, dark oceans. The Hubble spcae telescope brought back images of distant galaxies. Can we even comprehend the universe around us without relying on photographic images?

For centuries, scientists who wanted to depict the visual aspects of science had to rely on paintings, etchings, and even delicate glass sculptures in order to present worlds too microscopic or ephemeral for the naked eye. Microorganisms, for example, are abstract notions for many people who havent seen them through a microscope. Only recently has the general public been able to see what individual cells look like, as science photography mastered the art of the very small, and captured the beauty in these worlds. 

There's also Felice Frankel, one of the leading science photographers today, who has helped popularize and promote the visualization of science on a small scale. Her three books about the subject are great resources for understanding what goes into representation of physical forces with a static image.

Recently, Nikon held a photography contest, the results of which make up an amazing slide show, "Art and Science in a Small World." The best part is browsing through the diverse array of imaging techniques that can make subjects as seemingly bland as fish scales look like a collections of delicate neon hand-fans, or reveal a close-up of magmatic rock as a jeweled, Klimt-like landscape.

There are also other ways photography can literally add extra dimension to visualizing science. My classmate and I had been down in the ichthyology collections seeking Williston's help for a class project that involved taking pictures of a fossilized skull. A flat photograph couldn't quite capture all the indentations in the teeth. Finally we settled on a technique taught to us by our professor, used as a novelty when photography was still in its sepia-tinted youth, and still used today in some scientific papers—stereography.

This rather low-tech technique involves taking pictures from two different angles, and relies on the viewer to see them side-by-side while adjusting their eyes (or by wearing special glasses) to view the image in three dimensions. It's similar to Magic Eye images yet much more useful, especially in non-digitized science papers talking about very three dimensional things like chemical structures.

Clearly, although science photography is used for very practical purposes, science has always allowed, and even encouraged, aesthetics. Photography has managed to both revolutionize science communication and carry on a very old tradition of bringing the wonder of science to the general public with both innovation and style.

For more information on stereographs used in scientific communication the following papers go into some of the techniques in more complex images:

Miranowicz, Nikodem and Burewicz, Andrzej. Stages in the construction of stereograms of molecular models. Journal of Molecular Graphics, 1996, 14(2), pp 73-77.

Stevens, WL Conte. Stereoscopic astronomy. Nature, 1891, 43, pp 344-345.

Techniques used by the Fish Imaging Project:

Pérez, Mark H. Sabaj. Photographic atlas of fishes of the Guiana Shield. Bulletin of the Biological Society of Washington, 2009, pp 52-59.

Some of my favorite scientist-artists who came before the popularity of photography in science:

Ernst Haeckel 

John James Audubon 

Image credit goes to Dr. Tsutomu Seimiya, part of the 2009 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition found on the New York Times website.