[HN Gopher] Images from the 2023 Nikon Small World Photomicrogra...
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Images from the 2023 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition
Author : daoboy
Score : 127 points
Date : 2023-10-27 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nikonsmallworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nikonsmallworld.com)
| emptybits wrote:
| Travelling the universe at this scale seems as important and
| amazing to me as travelling to a distant star. The igniting
| matchstick image has so much going on!
|
| One cringe though ... the images all seem excessively post-
| processed to me. Unrealistically saturated, contrasted,
| sharpened, etc. The colour, especially, just seems over the top
| and I feel like seeing these microscopic subjects enlarged is
| mind-blowing enough without the postprocessing distraction which
| makes it seem _less_ real.
|
| Anyways, amazing images! Thanks!
| belval wrote:
| To my untrained eye I don't understand why #1 is #1, #2 has
| more interesting details and demonstrates much more skills.
| Perhaps I don't understand the evaluation parameters though, #1
| is probably a bigger technical achievement.
| c2occnw wrote:
| Since it's a photomicrography competition, 20X magnification
| vs 2.5X may play a factor in the judging?
| deepsun wrote:
| Not sure it demonstrates much more skills (lighting a match
| vs. extracting an optical nerve and differentiating it to
| proteins, glials and vasculature).
| belval wrote:
| I meant photography skills, clearly most people can strike
| a match.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I'm of two minds about the processing... if adding lots of
| artificial color, sharpening, and contrast brings out the
| detail(s) the researcher is looking for without actually
| altering them, then it seems like fair game.
|
| But yes, the raw photos would be nice to see as well, just for
| comparison's sake. That may be easier said than done given the
| prevalence of image stacking.
| dekhn wrote:
| One thing to note is that the fluorescence images like
| https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2023-photomicrogra...
| are false color. In those systems, you typically excite a
| specific fluorophore, one at a time (once for each type in the
| sample), and read out the result with a monochromatic camera
| through frequency-specific filters. The final image is
| composited with the grayscale intensity mapped to color value.
|
| I don't think the microscopy images underwent sharpening,
| although I'm not certain.
|
| My friend who works in the field prefers to look at individual
| color planes in monochrome (no color at all) rather than the
| super-saturated composites.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| I love it, thank you for sharing.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I understand why there are not many comments on this article. The
| images are amazing, they speak for themselves!
| lrc wrote:
| The 18th place entry (A cryptocrystalline micrometeorite resting
| on a #80 testing sieve) is like a still from the original
| Andromeda Strain movie
| dekhn wrote:
| Compare: https://cdn.theasc.com/Andromeda-Strain-Spore.jpg to
| https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/images/photos/2023/18th-2023...
|
| good memory :)
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Wow. I wonder if the photo was a deliberate homage.
| dekhn wrote:
| I wondered the same thing but then I concluded it was
| coincidental. If you're trying to filter for meteorites,
| you're going to be using that exactly hardware (a wire mesh
| basket), using a level of magnification that gives a view
| of the retained object, whose size is similar to the mesh
| screen hole diameter.
|
| I would imagine that the props department went to a nearby
| micrometerologist who gave them a basket with a micron mesh
| and maybe some small volcanic rocks.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| The carbon nanotubes looks oddly AI-generated to my eyes.
|
| https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/images/photos/2023/_photo160...
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| We posted the same comment at the exact same moment.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Definitely. Could be GAN superresolution artefacts though
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| The 16th place, "Carbon Nanotubes" really struck me as being
| generated by some AI. It has many of these hallmark
| "hallucination"-like features that we find in AI images.
|
| Am I not able to distinguish between reality and AI anymore?
| itronitron wrote:
| Those are all amazing photographs.
| mlsu wrote:
| Wow, the matchstick image is so striking (literally, ha ha ha).
|
| I looked and the same photographer took 6th in last year's
| competition for this:
|
| https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2022-photomicrogra...
|
| Such amazing images!
| jonplackett wrote:
| Those top two images are head snd shoulders above the rest.
|
| I expect there were some arguments about who should win. I'd
| have given to the match personally.
| goguy wrote:
| The caffeine crystals one is wild.
| munificent wrote:
| That trichinella cyst photo [1] is by Nathan Myhrvold [2], who is
| a name some here might recognize. He got rich as an early
| executive at Microsoft, used that to start a patent troll firm,
| and then got _really_ into cooking.
|
| His six-volume "Modernist Cuisine" is like the "The Art of
| Computer Programming" for molecular gastronomy.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2023-photomicrogra...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold
| dekhn wrote:
| He also built a nifty scope for photographing snowflakes.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/science/snowflakes-photos...
|
| It looks like he embedded it in a pelican case, I see some
| tubes probably for cooling the plate.
|
| IIRC he was a physicist before he worked at Microsoft.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Your _Crafting Interpreters_ is not bad yourself!
| digging wrote:
| Anyone with chemistry chops here able to explain what I'm seeing
| in #11 "Crystallized sugar syrup"? I do macrophotography myself
| and know roughly what 25x means, but I'm having trouble even
| parsing the scale of these structures. Sugar crystallizes in
| sheets?
| omoikane wrote:
| Be sure to browse the video gallery as well:
|
| https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/small-world-in-mot...
| dzonga wrote:
| these are beautiful photos.
|
| they inspire me.
|
| what would be the cheapest way to get into this as a hobby ? I
| understand hobbies are expensive but sometimes with minimal time,
| you wanna reduce costs.
| ishtanbul wrote:
| buy extension tubes for a DSLR camera. you will quickly learn
| to appreciate the challenges of focusing and lighting at that
| scale.
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(page generated 2023-10-27 23:00 UTC)