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Bug Eyes

I was browsing online yesterday and came across a stunning collection of eye macros.  Sort of scary and wonderful at the same time.

Most of the featured eyes are insect eyes – from flies to grasshoppers to bees.  Most insects have what are called “compound eyes” – they have anywhere from a handful to thousands of identical units called ommatidia, consisting of photoreceptors, support cells, pigment cells, and a clear cornea.  The combined messages from each of these structures results in an overall picture that appears almost like a mosaic.  You’ll notice that insect eyes bulge out, which gives them a far broader angle of view than most other eyes.

The spider eye and caterpillar eyes shown are comprised of “simple eyes” which are the opposite of compound eyes.  “Simple eyes” have a cornea – the jumping spider pictured here has two larger “simple eyes” that can only see a narrow field of view, surrounded by smaller “simple eyes” for its peripheral vision.

The caterpillar has a specific type of “simple eye” known as “stemmata” which produces a rough image – it is more sensitive to light and dark.  You’ll also notice that the caterpillar’s eyes are actually much smaller than they seem to be.  The the large “eye spots” surround its actual eyes, making the eyes seem bigger to predators.

And, of course, my personal favorite, the human eye!  One cornea, two eyes.  Don’t forget to take care of them.  At La Jolla LASIK Institute, I’m now doing yearly eye exams as well as LASIK for all of San Diego.

Pretty neat, huh?

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Photos that Changed My View of the Past

Russian imageI have loved photography as long as I can remember. It is part of a continuum of everything I do involving vision and seeing. I was never the star student in art class as a kid — I never learned to draw — so when I was about 10 and we were given a choice between drawing, sculpture, and photography for our project, I immediately chose the one of the three I knew I could do. I ran around with a camera taking out-of-focus images of the light reflected off of objects. When I turned in my black-and-white prints, my teacher studied them carefully and asked how I had produced them. She seemed amazed and curious. That day, I felt the power of photography to make us wonder.

Yesterday, I happened upon photographs taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a photographer sponsored by Tsar Nicholas II to record southern and central Russia from 1909 to 1912, before the world wars and communism. The images I had seen from a century ago were all black-and-white, and often degraded, creating an otherworldly distance. To make matters worse, the view cameras of the time required very long exposures, so the people posing for images were told not to smile or move so as not to blur the image.  In these Russian color photographs, most of the subjects are also stoically holding a pose for a long period, but a few are in more natural, almost “candid” poses, something rarely seen in photographs of that era.

The color in these photographs collapsed time for me. The grass and the trees are the same as today. The people are as real as my neighbors.   The color and the perfect preservation of the images transported me.  In 1907, the Lumiere brothers invented a camera that allowed with the use of three lenses with red, green and blue filters, the making of color photographs. A few extraordinary examples of photographs taken with the Lumiere brothers’ process and other early color processes are still in existence.

Here’s a link to more of the photographs, via The Boston Globe:

https://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html