The Infamous Contact Lens

This, believe it or not, is a contact lens. I was assigned to photograph something round, wet, and transparent - basically it's supposed to be the hardest project. We had a month to do it, yet I spent an hour in the lab and ended with this. I spent my month watching how my other classmates attempted to get good lighting. I took note of their lighting set ups and which ones worked well versus which ones didn't. And it allowed me to come up with my own lighting that also seemed to work well.

Out of Stock

This assignment was entertaining for me. We had to photograph "radiating energy" in a way that was captivating and interesting for middle school students. I decided that I wanted to photograph something with fluorescence, and luckily there was a vile of fluorescein from the Ophthalmic course sitting on a shelf in the lab, so I used that.

In the meantime, we also had to literally send this image to my professor's house. It's to show that we understand that to ship something, we need to have it finished prior to the due date. The image needs to arrive at his house the day before the critique.

I figured this was something that would end up on the cover of a textbook. Maybe it's not the most interesting photograph, but it's cool to look at none the less. I can't wait to see what my classmates are doing for this assignment!

I Really Don't Like Nature

We took a class field trip to Mendon Ponds. It's a HUGE park between Henrietta and Pittsford, NY. The assignment was to be there at sunrise (7:15am on a Sunday!) in order to photograph nature in beautiful light. We were lucky in that just after sunrise, the skies opened up, and the sun shined down on us.
I feel like now I've been initiated into Biomed; this is an annual field trip that's been a part of everyone's experience as a second year Biomeder since Michael took the job here. Now the catch with this project is that was that each of us picked a word out of a hat; and that was what we had to photograph. I picked "water," so all of my photographs from the day are water-based.

The Leaves Change

My class was given about three weeks to complete this assignment. And when we all handed in our posters, it was clear who did the project in advance, and who waited until the last minute. The students who started right away had beautiful green leaves in their images, while those who waited had leaves that were clearly changing with the season.

The point of the project was to learn how to use the scanners as cameras. You can take an 8x10 image of something at 1200 dpi, which allows for greater room to enlarge the final image. This poster is originally 16x20 (inches), and that large leaf on the left side takes up at least half of the overall poster... and it doesn't have a hint of grain.

The only criticism I received on the poster was the stylization of the in-situ photograph of the leaves. (I'm also aware that this has the incorrect species...)

Photographing Filament

This is a part of the forensic assignment, but I wanted this image to have it's own blurb. The image is supposed to show the metallic qualities of the filament. The photograph was pretty elementary for the most part. I back lit the light bulb and added some black felt on either side to create a black line. The filament was lacking a lot of contrast, so I added that back in to achieve the metallic qualities my professor was looking for.

Forensics

Here we had to take a photograph of our finger, as well as make a finger print. We then had to dust the finger print (a task that I found to be much harder than it seems- there's always too much dust!) and then take a photograph of it. I made my life easier and just made my finger print on a slide, and added the dust over top. Photographing it was easy, but I spent well over an hour trying to edit out all the extra dirt and dust from the slide.

Ew Mold!

I get it. I need to go to the grocery store. But I thought this image was cool... there are a ton of different species of mold on that single piece of bread. But the reason this picture is so fascinating to me is because I thought that the mold might fluoresce under a black light. To my disappointment, it didn't. But it was a cool experiment. Strangely, it smelled like alcohol...

Polar Opposites

I'm sure that all of you have seen a clear i-pod case before. This is what it looks like when you can see all the stress marks within the plastic. To do this, the subject is back lit, and then placed between to polarizing filters. The two filters block out all the light except for that coming though the subject. I think it looks pretty cool.

Double Bubble

For this assignment we had to photograph bubbles. One had to be brightfield, and the other had to be darkfield. The project was an exercise in subject control - those crazy bubbles kept POPPING, and they were constantly moving around. It created quite the challenge, but I found that keeping it to only a single layer of bubbles really made it easier to photograph.

Cone Head

I'm taking Photo 2 this quarter. It's the class where you actually learn everything that can get you through the macro and micro courses that one takes as an upperclassmen. Things make a lot more sense now. I should have taken this course last year...

In the meantime, the first assignment was to photograph a pinecone. Believe it or not, it's a lot harder than it seems. We needed to light it so we could see all its characteristics... and since a pinecone is mostly black and brown, it made for a difficult subject.