Showing posts with label liquid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liquid. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Goodness Gracious, Great Balls of Water!


Here are a few photos of very tiny water drops which clung to a mushroom or fungus growing out of the shady side of a tree stump. I like how they look so round, the seem to be caught in motion while rolling down the side. But they were all stationary, in reality.

In the first photo above, my flash had failed to fire, so this picture is the result of some extreme exposure adjustment to compensate for the lack of light. But I like the color and graininess anyway, so here it is. The other photos are the result of my flash firing as I'd planned and are fascinating for their own reasons. I like the look of the focused light landing on the mushroom surface after having traveled through the lens of water.







Send me your suggestions for something tiny that you'd like to see big.


Thursday, November 5, 2009

Wine and Cheese Social




It's standard practice to have refreshments, something like wine and cheese, for guests at an art opening or studio tour. For my Tiny Lab exhibit at the Hoboken Studio Tour, I chose to forego edible refreshments, and instead gave out small cards printed with macro images of wine and cheese. I had hoped these would be memorable and unique for my guests.

I did get some positive feedback, some visitors did seem delighted. And at least one blogger mentioned my refreshments in his blog. So I suppose it worked.

Above and below are two microphoto images of port. This came from the bottom of the bottle, so the sediment (composed primarily of shredded grape skins I guess) has collected in these drops I used in the setup. I love the color and luminance of these photos.



Below are two microphotos of cheese. The one directly below here is cheddar, and the one at the bottom of this post is gruyere. In both cases, I had simply sliced a thin sliver of cheese, and then torn the edge to get an interesting subject for the photo. Some visitors to Tiny Lab were a bit skeptical that this was cheese. I assure it you it was.




Send me your suggestions for something tiny that you'd like to see big.


Saturday, January 17, 2009

Liquid Crystal Displays, up close and personal



I had shot the LCD on my laptop (above) to see what the pixels look like. As expected, each pixel on your and my display are composed of three components, a red, a green and a blue, which together make white (when all are on), black (when all are off) and every color in between (at least to the human eye). You can also see how dirty my screen is. Gotta clean that.

To my surprise, the components that make up each pixel are vertical rectangles, as you can see. I don't know much about LCD pixel configurations, but I was also intrigued by the way each pixel component appeared to be comprised of a long piece and a short piece. This could simply be a visual affect of some sort of circuit overlay that makes them appear to be two pieces. They also have very real little shapes, with an angled corner. Interesting.

Curious, I took some shots of other LCDs around. Below is a closeup of the display on the back of a pocket digital snapshot camera. You can see the pixels are smaller, and more square, though they still appear to be segmented in some way. You can also see that the designers of this display below weren't as concerned with the "squareness" of the visual pixel created by the combination of the three colored components. The red, green, and blue together make a long rectangular pixel rather than a square one. Also in this example, there is evidence of some visual distortion due to the anti-glare coating on the screen, which was not present on the laptop example above.


In the next example below, I've shot the pixels of our LCD TV, which you can see are much larger (detail isn't as important on a TV since you sit further away) sending much brighter light out to the viewers than the smaller pixels do. You can also see that the these big honkin' pixel elements are "divided" in halves, though again this could be a visual effect of having some sort of circuit overlaid on the pixels.

Also, the anti-glare coating distortion is much more prominent on this example than on the previous one. The distortion looks oddly similar to compression artifacts or distortion induced from extreme up-sampling of an image (which this is not). But I assure you, this was absolutely in focus, and you are seeing the image as untainted by post-processing as possible. All three of these LCD pixel images are the same aspect ratio and crop factor, meaning they haven't been changed in size relative to eachother in any way.

Now I expect all three of my readers will be squinting at every display around them for the next few days, trying to see what's in there.


Send me your suggestions for something tiny that you'd like to see big.

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