photography

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    Convergence

    This scene caught my eye because of the way many strands of web all converged on the single leaf. This was taken on a foggy morning, and the strands stood out because they were covered in drops of water. I think the thing that seemed surprising was the sheer number of individual strands. Looking at…

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    Beautiful Fading

    This is a picture of fading flowers taken while looking upwards into a tree. Even though the flowers are fading, definitely past their prime, something about this scene still struck me as pretty, almost whimsical. I framed the flowers deliberately off center, I think because it added to the sense of whimsy or light-heartedness. The…

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    Escape

    This is a picture of a leek blossom, just opening up. It’s actually a bundle of small flowers. I like this picture because of its beauty. Part of that, to me, is the sense of things moving towards the right. There’s a tension, a leaning in that direction that makes it seem as if individual…

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    Seeing Life

    One of the persistently difficult questions that comes up in science is how to define life – how to determine if something is living. To most of us, it’s fairly obvious. Plants and animals, including humans, are alive. Rocks, water, and so on, are not. However, the question gets more complicated for scientists that study…

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    Viewing Spherical Photos as Cylinders

    Previously, I described an alternative way to represent pointers to spherical photos. Usually they are static online pictures, which works since a hyperlink can then send the viewer to the full, interactive picture. However, another possibility is to make the pointer a physical picture, printed out and maybe even hung on the wall. The same…

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    New Ways to Engage With Spherical Photos

    In an earlier essay, I talked about the different pieces of a spherical photograph experience. Here, I want to look at the static introduction image piece a little more closely. Spherical photos are inherently interactive because humans cannot see an entire sphere at one time without severely distorting the image. Before interacting with the image,…

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    Another Way to Focus

    I recently took a picture of some plants that had interesting leaves. The picture had a calm aspect, the details on the leaves looking almost fuzzy. A little later, I reprocessed it to be black and white. The result gave a different feel to the picture. With the green color removed, the unusually shaped leaves…

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    Not A Photograph

    This picture started out as a photograph of a crack in the street. The shape reminded me of a lightning bolt, so as an exercise, I processed it in Photoshop to enhance that freeling. Carefully cropped it, inverted it so the black crack became white, and so on. The result is a little abstract, but…