Scientific Photography and Applied Imaging

Rating:
Summary: Scientific Photography and Applied Imaging
Review: Knowing Sidney Ray's writings for Applied Photographic Opitcs (second edition) and from his/her (?) introductory overview textbooks, I was certainly positively inclined towards the author. The book is well structured with historical introduction and a chapter on human perception at the beginning. The technical chapters on lighting, optics, processing, and specialty applications are up to date and fully referenced (which is a rarety among the usual crop of photographic how-to books). Those interested in more recent technological devlopments (lasers, UV, far IR, spectrophotometry, ...) will find a treasure chest in this volume.

The only significant let-down was the chapter 11 on image processing and analysis (including Photoshop). The chapters concentrates on simplistic examples of gadget filters (gaussian blur etc.) that are not employed in science (at least as far as I have ever experienced it). Explaing the use of alpha channels to improve color contrast in B&W print images would have been much more helpful. The omission of NIH image is yet another inexplicable phenomenon, as it is THE premier platform for quantitative image analysis.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for those interested in scientific applications of photography. This includes those like myself who deal on a day-to-day basis with various photographic challenges as working scientists (repro, extreme macro, micro, SEM/TEM, field photography, underwater). For a fuller mathematical treatment of the optical principles, you may want also to get his/her (?) '94 volume on optics. In the end you will find yourself referring back and forth between these two complementary tomes.