They are shades of the rainbow—blues, yellows, reds, and greens—arranged in a luminous pattern of imperfect rectangles. They look like swatches of silk fabric. Or the tops of paintbrushes, one next to the other, dipped in multiple pots of color. Amazing to think that the glorious shapes in this digital photograph are actually the scales of a moth's wing. Magnified 100 times under a microscope, they are far more intricate than the shimmering wing you'd see with your naked eye. Charles Krebs, the photographer who took the image, is positively joyful when he talks about the drama of nature seen up close. "It's just absolutely stunning to peel off layer upon layer," he says. "Instead of getting simpler and simpler, it gets more complex."
It is called photomicrography—a process that allows scientists and hobbyists to create colorful and stunningly detailed photographs of nonliving objects and living organisms up close. Very close. Scientists have been documenting microscopic discoveries for centuries—first drawing them and then, with the advent of photography in the 1800s, taking pictures of them. Over the last two decades, digital technology has revolutionized the field, allowing researchers to capture details that have never been seen before in sharp focus. Nowhere is the power of photomicrography better documented than in Nikon's Small World photomicrography competition, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. In photographs dating back to 1977, crystals, neurons, larvae, knitting needles, fabrics, and hundreds of other organisms and objects reveal scientific information and artistic beauty. This week, Nikon announced its top 20 winners for 2009, the best of almost 3,000 entries from around the world.
In the 35 years since the contest began, technology has dramatically advanced the field of microscopic imaging. Early on, photomicrography faced the challenge that came with old-fashioned film: researchers couldn't see what they were capturing in real time, so they had to take multiple images to get one that was well lighted, well focused, and well framed. "It was always potluck to see what you would get at the end," says Alan Opsahl, a senior scientist in the Investigative Pathology Group at Pfizer. "You wasted a lot of film, time, and energy to get that perfect image." Today digital photography allows scientists to see their pictures as they take them and provides far more flexibility as they prepare their final images on a computer. Researchers can, for example, adjust colors to produce the most effective result. Opsahl did this with an image of mouse brain cells, which he submitted to Nikon's contest this year. In the original digital image, the biological stains he used labeled the nuclei of the cells blue and the cell bodies and processes brown. But Opsahl liked it the other way around, because it allowed the delicate neurons to stand out better. "I flip-flopped the colors, much like you do with a negative," he says. Nikon's rules state that photos must be taken with a light microscope—as opposed to an electron microscope, which can achieve even higher levels of magnification—but there are no restrictions on how color is used.
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