Mood:  a-ok

Take a lookit this picture.

Nice, huh? It was selected as a Feature Picture by Wikimedia Commons (Wikipedia's media dump) but for some reason all efforts to nominate it as an FP on Wikipedia proper are stymied.

I bring this up not just because I love to use the word 'stymied' in a sentence (and I do) but because I have a hard time understanding the rationale for not FP-ing the thing: some naysayers claim that much better and higher-resolution pictures of the eye can be taken for Wikipedia's use.

Ooookay: but right now that's the best eye image they've got, and I wouldn't poo-poo the act of taking a photo of the human eye: it's not as easy as it looks. After attempting the act myself I'm convinced that the resolution of that photo is damn-well excellent. If it's beatable as an image, it ain't beatable by much.

For all my attempts I couldn't manage half the resolution power of that image (granted my camera's not as good, but it is usually excellent with extreme close-up shots). Lighting issues are a nightmare, eyelashes get in the way and hog the focus, shit gets reflected off the eye and into the picture (especially the camera itself: I've got a stack of pictures where my pupil proudly states that it's a product of the Canon corporation...) 

I've given up on getting a really crisp eye shot. The best I could do is take two of my better attempts and false-color the things; makes 'em interesting enough to overcome their lack of clarity, anyway...

^ The lightsource got into this one (that long black smudge on the left). I have neither the proper equipment nor the expertise with lighting issues to fix that...

^ At least you get some nice blood vessels with this one. The light was visible on it as well, but here I cheated and smoothed-out the left side. You can see the rim of the camera circling the pupil about a third of the way outside the iris. I didn't notice it 'till I was finished coloring. To hell with it...

These pics are 800 x 600, but the originals are a massive 2560 x 1920. Doesn't matter, though: it's all grains and blurs at that resolution.

Anyway: my own attempts make me appreciate that image a whole lot more... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:36 PM ADT

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