I remember reading somewhere about a school of philosophical thought which holds that there can be no art without the resistance of the medium -- that the art is in the difficulty the artist overcomes when trying to make the medium express his or her message.

I don't know that I buy the idea, but I do notice that my cell phone camera doesn't have a very broad color or contrast palette, so it tends to blow out highlights and lose shadow detail -- and that I'm starting to recognize opportunities to exploit those weaknesses:

I'm not sure I like being trained to a particular visual style like that, though. I picked up a camera in the first place in order to see differently, and I've been very pleased with the change in my world that this practice has rendered. I don't think I want to put blinders on it.

Quite a difference two months makes (no, I didn't photoshop the colours!):

From my flash new company phone:

The top image is from my commute to work in the morning, at Beaverton Transit Center where I missed my connection by (quite literally) seconds and had to wait half an hour for the next bus. The bottom image is from my commute home in the evening, at SW 9th and Yamhill where I had ten minutes to wait for my train. I took a neat little video too, soundtrack courtesy of a busker with a violin, but it's too big for snapfish and my phone is locked-in to Microsoft-related email services so I haven't figured out how to upload it yet.

When you count cells, you often mix them with a dilute solution of a dye which is excluded by living cells but can cross the membrane of dead cells -- this allows you to count viable and dead cells separately. Probably the most common dye for the purpose (at least, the only one I've ever used) is Trypan blue, which is a very pretty blue color.

Everyone has their own ways of adding the dye; I tend to recycle the lid of a discarded culture dish as a mixing surface, pipetting 10 µl of 2X Trypan blue in buffered salt solution onto the lid and then mixing with 10 µl of cell suspension. Since the cell counter only takes 10 µl, that leaves half of each mixture drying in spots all over the lid as I count my way through my cultures.

One day I decided to take some photomicrographs of the resulting patterns. The crystals are salts; I think the dye tends to dry into blobs rather than crystallizing. The round things that look like alien eggs in images 2 and 3 are what was left behind by air bubbles.

I was reminded today, by Björn's post about modern art, of something I've been meaning to post for a long time. I'm hardly the first person to notice that the products and by-products of scientific experiments can be very pretty, and I find that often the story and the science behind the object or image gives it an extra dimension. For instance this:

is electrostatic discharge, captured on x-ray film -- static electricity that really is static.

It's an artifact caused by wrapping developed chemiluminescent western blots in cling wrap prior to exposing them -- you have to wrap the blots so as not to wet the film, but it can create static discharges which fan out across your results when you peel the blots away from the film in order to develop it. This is one that was well away from my data, so I scanned it just for itself.

I'm sure I could string together 500 words of postmodern bullshit about the fact that this picture was the accidental result of a real experiment, a (literal) spark thrown from the anvil on which knowledge was being forged... all I need now is an agent with contacts in the art world and a bunch of people with more money than sense.

Update 090709: Ha! I'm in good company, apart from my snotty remarks about the art world of course -- about half way through this story, modern master Hiroshi Sugimoto talks about pictures he made in the darkroom without a camera, using static electricity. And yes, they look a lot like my autorads!

Being unemployed is not all bad. I like having time to make pictures.

Mine, when I have time for it, is photography. I'll still post some photos, like the mouse below, to this blog; but now I have a separate blog for those images I would (if I weren't worried about sounding like a complete wanker) call "my art". The link is at the top of the new column at left, where I'll manually add thumbnails from that blog. It's at Expressions.com, because I haven't the time to make exactly what I want and of all the photoblogging services I tried, only Expressions gave me enough control over the format to make it (nearly) as simple as I wanted.

So. Fwiw, there it is. Hat tip, again, to Andrew and Ralf.

In case anyone was wondering, this is the sort of thing I do all day. That cotton-candy-looking stuff is mouse genomic DNA, about 600 micrograms of it, harvested from a tumor caused (we're trying to find out how) by deletion of the MNT gene in T cells. I was going to try to say something profound, but the little DNA monster (the "eyes" are air bubbles trapped when the DNA came out of solution) rather deflated my pomposity.

I have the dreaded lurgy. It's not the Martian Death Flu, but it's not much fun either and my brain feels like it's packed in cotton wool, so in lieu of real content here is some flower porn:

When I lived in Brisbane, daylillies were the harbingers of Spring; here in Portland, it's daffodils. Also cherry trees, tulips, magnolias, camelias, pansies and several flowers I don't yet know the names of. Portland is a good place to live if you like flowers. (Or if you don't.)

This is an old trick, but I never tire of it. What you do is shoot a pale flower against a dark background (the foliage will usually do), and expose for the highlights or even one stop over. Then simply process the print or digital negative so that the background is black.

That is a photo, but it's a photo of the shadow KC cast as she sat in the front window. I didn't have time to grab the tripod so it was underexposed, hence the noise from altering levels and sharpening in PhotoShop. I'd prefer it sharp, I think, but I like it well enough this way.

Although I only ended up with four I like, I made more than sixty images of this lunch area where I work. I like the top image best, and it's the closest to what I had in mind when I started.

I have something of an obsession with sunlight.

I'm often bored waiting for the bus.

It's usually dark when I leave work, so I made much of this sunlight.

I'll probably continue to post self-portraits every now and then; it'll be interesting to watch me age. Interesting to me, I mean. What, you thought I did this for other people to read?

(Five brownie points to the first commenter to explain the title.)

Edward Hopper once said that all he ever really wanted to paint was sunlight on a wall, a comment that affected me powerfully when I first read it and has remained with me ever since. I think of it often, particularly when I see something simple and beautiful. This is sunlight in the corridor at work.

(Amanda: the unaltered originals of those shots, and a couple of others, are here. Apart from cropping and resizing, the only things I did to the smaller versions above was sharpened them slightly and altered the levels a little. If you don't have the requisite software I'll be happy to make whatever alterations you want to the larger versions.)

Phooey. The full image is too busy, even after I deliberately lost a lot of shadow detail, but the cropped version is oddly proportioned and spoiled by that burned-out area on the wall.

(The top image is a humongous file because I wanted to avoid compression artefacts; don't look too closely at the gazania either!)