small sandy stonehenge…part 2
Ok, ok…I know: its about time I posted Part 2 of Small Sandy Stonehenge! So, here it is. Taken at Presque Isle State Park in Erie, PA. Gorgeous beach. Lovely daytrip with my mom. Enjoy the photo. Short & sweet.
Taken with the Canon G7. Contrast fixed in Photoshop CS3.
through the drinking glass…again…
So, once again, I was a thirsty med student trying to diligently study…but succeeding at getting distracted. If it wasn’t the cats trying to play with me (Izzie always brings me toys so she can play fetch!), then it was my favorite blue-and-clear glass full of water. I know, I know, you’re wondering why the heck I was spending so much time staring at my water glass. Well, try studying gastrointestinal pathology and drugs for constipation and diarrhea and then let me know what percentage of your time was spent trying to picture anything but the inside of someone’s colon. 
So, I whipped out the Canon G7 and shot away. It was quite fun playing with the coloration of the glass and the water level. And here we have it! Contrast enhanced in Photoshop CS3.
Oh, and don’t worry. I finished my studying.
a rose by any other name…
This pretty little bud made its debut in my mom’s garden this past summer. It just looked so lovely after a sunshower that I simply couldn’t resist taking a few snapshots! Aren’t rainy roses just wonderful?
Sorry for the few and far between posts! Med school is a bit demanding right now, especially with my boards just a few months away, so keep checking back for a new post!
As usual, taken with the Canon Powershot G7. Post-processed for contrast in Photoshop CS3. Enjoy!
For Grammy, 11/10/1918 – 2/12/2010. You are loved and missed.
busy as a bee…
I’ve been as busy as this little bee lately…hence the severe lack of new posts in the past couple of weeks!! I’m in between my first and second years of medical school (read: last summer EVER) and I have the most amazing job honing my clinical skills in the Temple ER! That said, I’m pulling insane hours at the hospital/preparing my body for the sleep-deprived years to come and simply haven’t had the time to really sit down with my photos and put together a decent post. So, for all of you anxiously awaiting a post, I apologize for the delay and present you with…A BEE!
I snapped this little bugger on my brother’s porch over the Memorial Day weekend. A wee bit of cropping was done, as it is pretty darn hard to properly compose a shot when your subject is a centimeter long and constantly moving. A little bit of contrast fixing was also done, as yellow flowers + yellow bee stripes + super sunny day = totally washed out color/contrast levels.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot…this was taken with the fabulous Canon G7!!
have i told you lately that…
This one goes out to the one I love (sorry for the REM quote). Some say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I think this one says precisely three. THE three little words. My wonderful boyfriend (of over 3 years!) and I embarked on an adventure out to the Jersey Shore on Friday. I love the beach. I love my boyfriend. I was ridiculously happy. Anyhoo, the water was wonderful, particularly for body surfing, and lounging in the sunshine was simply delightful. He fried to a wonderful lobster-red shade, I turned a lovely golden brown. Ah, the wonders of sunblock. Towards the end of the day, I noticed that the clouds were simply beautiful overhead and I got an idea. I had seen silhouette “writing” somewhere and I thought it would be a cute surprise for the aforementioned man in my life (who will willingly watch the Bachelorette with me while enjoying Chinese take-out and ice cream) if I did a little sky writing myself. The people behind me on the beach obviously thought I was nuts as I kept making contorted hand shapes in the air and then snapping pictures of them, but oh, what one will do for love.
So, now for the specs: Six pictures taken against a beachy sky with the Canon Powershot G7. Compiled and contrast-enhanced in Photoshop to really make my hand-letters pop. Size of final image reduced in Photoshop because the original compilation was over 3oo inches long and my computer was visibly having trouble handling and touching up such a massive photo. Enjoy.
glutamine, shmutamine…
Its been a while since I put up a hardcore nerd photo. And, well, there’s no time like the present! I made a solution (at my old lab, of course) of the amino acid glutamine. When a drop of the solution is placed on a microscope slide and allowed to dry out, crystals of glutamine form. I tossed those puppies under the microscope (Olympus BX51) and took a picture at 10x. Gotta love the ice-like quality of the crystals and the rainbow refractions!
Gosh, I sure do miss the good ol’ lab days sometimes! I was always able to do the most unique microscopic photography there!!!
through the drinking glass…
Allow me to fill you in on the birth of this photograph. I was studying for my Block 6 Pharmacology/Pathology/Immunology final (fun, right?). At the same time, I was enjoying a nice cold glass of grape juice. Drinking the grape juice was infinitely better than studying, so I sat there and finished it in one shot. Placing the glass down on my desk and looking inside of it to waste yet more time, I noticed that, “Heck, this could be a cool photo.” Translation: anything, including photographing grape juice residue, is better than studying for this darn final. Grabbed the trusty Canon G7 and had a small photo shoot with my glass. Then I popped the picture into Photoshop for some contrast adjustment and bleaching effects…and there you go! Amazing timewaster…I mean, piece of photographic art!
Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, yes, I did pass that final and successfully completed my first year of medical school. Yay!
divine dahlia: part three…
All good things must come to an end…including the Divine Dahlia mini-series! Hope you have been enjoying the photos! Now, I know that this flower was beautiful in all of its colored glory, but I really wanted to try some good ol’ black-and-white to bring out the details in the petals…and I think it worked!
As usual, the photo was taken with the Canon G7. Post-processed in Photoshop to select the color of the black-and-white filter. Enjoy and stay tuned for more pictures!
divine dahlia: part two…
Part two in the mini-series!! Again, taken with the Canon G7. This photo had its contrast fixed a tiny bit in Photoshop. Enjoy one of the bloomin’ beauties of spring!
divine dahlia: part one…
Ok. I’m in love with this flower. It is one of the gorgeous dahlia plants that my mother has at home…and it was so beautifully colored and flawless that I simply couldn’t resist making it the star of its very own photo shoot. This photo is number one of a 3 photograph mini-series.
As usual, the amazing Canon Powershot G7 was used. I think it was definitely more fortuitous than planned that the detail in this bloom showed up so well…who knew dahlias have tiny hair-like things on their petals (look at the center petals up close). And, I’m happy to announce that the sunlight was so perfect that absolutely nothing was “fixed” on this photo…straight from the memory card! Yay!
one of these things is not like the other…
Can you find it? The one thing that’s not quite like the others? Yes, okay, that was pretty easy. The open window. So much for that bit of fun. This photo was taken out in Old City in Philadelphia…near Shirt Shop Corner! I simply fell in love with the old worn brick and weathered blue wood around the windows…it felt like that building just had so much history in it. Perhaps Betsy Ross or Ben Franklin visited friends in that building at one point? Who knows, but its fun to imagine the happenings in old historical places!
Anyhoo, the photograph was taken with the lovely Canon Powershot G7 (of course!) and just had a smidge of contrast adjustment done to produce the final product! Enjoy!
verdant fern…
This shot is of a rather interesting fern that happened to catch my eye during a stroll through Pittsburgh’s Phipp’s Conservatory. It was taken with an Olympus Stylus 820 digital camera and colorized in Adobe CS3 to make the leaves really pop! Enjoy!!
teratoma…tera…tera…teraWHAT??
Image description: Human teratoma, 60x magnification, immunofluorescent confocal microscopy on Olympus IX81 with a Fluoview 1000 confocal head. Note the simple columnar epithelium with goblet cells (reminiscent of intestinal epithelium) and extensive vasculature. Image taken at the Center for Biologic Imaging (CBI). The tumor specimen is, in fact, my own. I had a softball-sized mature cystic teratoma on my ovary and it was removed during emergency surgery. See the comments section if you’d like the whole (fun!) story. Remember…I worked in an imaging lab…that’s why I was able to take the specimen with me and image it at the lab. What scientist could resist the chance to image something so cool and uncommon??? Not me, that’s for sure! And don’t worry…the lab thought it was cool, not gross.
P.S. They mention a teratoma in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Don’t believe me? Watch the dinner scene towards the end where the parents meet each other. The aunt talks about her friend who had one on her neck. Dead serious about that.
sakura!!!
It is that wonderful cherry blossom (sakura in Japanese) time of year! This little gem was growing, of all places, on a lovely little tree in East Falls underneath the Roosevelt Expressway! I used my shutterbug syndrome enabler, the G7, to snap the flower. Post-processing was done to transform the photo into HDR-style and to bring out the details in the petals!
just add flower and water…
So I went out to my car this morning to start the daily commute to good ol’ med school and it just so happened to be pretty much the one day that I had my camera with me, as I wanted to take some pics of our acapella group (shout out to the Transplantations!!). And, as luck would have it, my windshield presented me with the perfect subject to shoot in the morning light! So, I quickly chose to get on the road a bit late in favor of a bit o’ photography. Thus came this shot. The flower is actually the underside of some flower that had fallen off of a tree and drifted onto my car. The water was courtesy of the veritable 10 minute monsoon that we had the night before. So, here’s the recipe for a photograph:
Add flower to water. Marinate overnight. Capture in the morning light.
steel…er…spring magnolias!
These gorgeous magnolias were in full bloom right in front of my apartment. Endless flowers that seemingly touch the sky–what a wonderful way to bring in spring. The image was taken with a Canon Powershot G7. The photo was then post-processed in Photoshop to fix the coloration and then transformed into a high-dynamic range image. Enjoy!
green with envy…
This little bugger was snapped with my new lover…er…Canon G7. I just can’t get enough of that little gem! The tiny tree sprouting on a wall by the Schyulkill River (in Philadelphia) looked ever so lonely, stuck between essentially a rock and a hard place. I used the color selection capability on the camera, coupled it with the macro setting and just went to town. I also post-processed the image into an HDR photograph.
A little something green to tide everyone over until spring!
Pretty in Pink #3
This lovely pink zinnia was grown by the green thumb of my brother. I have to say that I love the contrast between the pink flower and the blue glass behind it The picture was taken with an Olympus Stylus 820 digital camera. Enjoy the third image in my “Pretty in Pink” series!
Pretty in Pink #2
These beautiful magnolias were captured on a lovely spring day using and Olympus Stylus 820 digital camera. Believe it or not, the white background for the flowers is indeed the sky…just the right combination of sunlight and angling the camera up at the magnolia tree, while using the sky as a background! One of those serendipitous right-place-right-time deals. The image was then processed using HDR software. Keep checking back for a small “Pretty in Pink” series that I am currently posting!
Pretty in Pink #1
This image was taken of a lovely pink flower in a bouquet that I bought to help chase the gray winter days away. A Canon Powershot G7 (new camera! yay!) on the macro setting. I would just like to comment on this camera: AMAZING!! Its nearly a full-fledged dSLR, but in a wonderfully compact size and with the ability to attach extra lenses. Its newer cousin, the G9 is currently available (this shoots in the RAW format), but I’m currently enjoying my little affair the G7 and don’t have eyes for any other camera 
It’s an alien, it’s a microbe, it’s….CHICORY!
This image is a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image. The chicory pollen was mounted on an aluminum stub, sputter coated with gold, and imaged at 2000x magnification at the Center for Biologic Imaging (CBI). As SEM images are naturally black and white, the blue hue was added in using Adobe Photoshop.
Orchid
Some of you are probably wondering what the heck the image under my blog title is. Well, for those inquisitive souls, here you go. This is a close-up of an orchid. Taken with an Olympus Zoom D595Z digital camera and posted for your viewing pleasure.
Butterfly
Iris
This is a macro shot of an iris in my backyard spring garden. Taken with an Olympus Zoom D595Z digital camera.
