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For my photogrammetry still life I recorded my sunglasses, with the cleaning cloth draped over it. I was very pleased with how the fabric turned out, but unsurprisingly the transparency of the sunglasses/lens didn’t come across and left somewhat of a hole.

I had a hard time deciphering the writers definition of the term “non-human” photography. Is “non-human” referring to the subject matter? Does “non-human” have something to do with the mode of capture? Wasn’t sure about this.

From a very simple standpoint a “non-human” thing is something that is not human – so the photographic equipment, the computers for processing the captured data, the helicopter carrying the camera equipment, etc.  The text implies that as technology advances the process of imaging becomes more dominated by these “non-human” elements, in some ways contemporary photography is less human. But photography has always been in defined by the image creators relationship to some technology. The writer suggest’s that the new technologies for capture are intensifying and changing the photographers relationship to the technology.

The most compelling implications of the text was the idea that photographers have always been inventors, and in many ways experimental capture is not a new pursuit, rather the world of experimental capture is just expanding as we’re presented with new technologies.

I brought some ground up coffee from a bag which I consume everyday to the SEM. From the Millimetre scale it looked as expected, with the structures forming cave like forms. However, when I got to the nanometer scale things became much more interesting. With the fibres of the coffee clear, and due to the heat of the electron microscope, as the image was rasterising the sample would move resulting in the wavy images below. This notion of capturing movement in a static image I was very much excited by (evident in the fact that the most part of my images were of this).

When I commented on the fact that they looked almost like hair, I was informed that the structural differences in them were very apparent, wherein human hair is almost a scalelike structure, whereas plant fibres are more regimented and neighbour to neighbour.

 

For my visit to the Pitt Center for Biologic Imaging I cut a tiny slice of a dried sweetened orange slice.

millimeter scale (above)

nanometer scale (above)

anaglyph (above)

 

I was really blown away by this process! It was really fascinating to be able to see something already so tiny, even further up close. The larger squares in the first image are sugar crystals. In the more zoomed in images, it appears to look like a weird, swiss cheese moonscape. Upon my arrival I learned that there was some concern that this item would not work, as there may have been small amount of moisture in even the dried fruit, but it did (Donna tested this and knew this before my arrival). I am looking forward to seeing what other people captured. In my visit we discussed what objects/processes and how photogrammetry might work with these types of images. We ended up discussing what bugs might look like under the Scanning Electron Microscope and then turned into photograms.

 

Other photos below:

Getting to use the electron scanning microscope was such a cool experience. I chose to scan some of my favorite tea (Bigelow Constant Comment, a very common spiced black tea), thinking there would be a lot of different types of things mixed together. Well, maybe the components were too well mixed together, or maybe only the same kind of component stuck to the tape, but it all looked more homogenous than I expected. Here are some familiar views that I captured (20x and 27x zoom, respectively):

I believe the big chunk may be a piece of orange peel, with the rest being standard “tea leaves.” I couldn’t decide what to zoom in on, so I did a few different unfamiliar views. The first is of that hole in the largest chunk:

I took several pictures of this from different angles, making two of them into this 3D image:

The second unfamiliar view is of a trichome (a little hair that helps leaves retain moisture) on one of the smallest tea leaves:

Which I made into this 3D image:

I think this trichome looks delightfully creepy. However, I  took a look at both of the 3D pictures I made with red/blue glasses, and didn’t find either of them very successful. There just isn’t much depth, and some parts don’t look in focus anymore. Perhaps it’s the angles I chose, but if anyone can see where I went wrong and how I might fix it, I’d love suggestions.

Finally, I took one more unfamiliar view at about the highest zoom I could get before losing all clarity (15000x). It doesn’t look like much, so I didn’t do a 3D image of this one, but it certainly is unfamiliar. Maybe the added surface area that the roughness provides somehow helps it diffuse its flavor into the water more?

I brought the top of an acorn.

It was comprised of these little squiggly spaghetti-like things.

 

It was a bit tough capturing the stereo pair because the acorn kept moving around. Donna said this was because it was a bit large and the electrons were hitting it and causing it to shift a bit. In the end the stereo really just captured the movement of the acorn around on the surface, but I think it creates an interesting effect. It was pretty unexpected to see the acorn top made up of this kind of structure and was cool to be able to zoom way into it.

On the inside cross-section of the acorn there were these dead cells.