Earth as Art

From landscape to still life, artists have been finding inspiration in nature for centuries, perhaps millennia. So it would stand to reason that not all art needs to be created from our imaginations and skillful brushes. In fact, the above web address, supports this point.

The Library of Congress is featuring an exhibition of LANDSAT-7 images in one of their buildings. However you can view many of the images online at the NASA site above. I can recommend a few images that I found particularly pleasing to the eye, Dragon Lake in Asia and Karmen Vortices in South America. Not only do I consider this artwork but they are also events. Swirling clouds may be common but like a picture of a guy sliding into homeplate or the photo finish of a horse race, each moment is unique.

This has always been one of the strong points of photography, to catch a moment of time. While images of the coastline of Greenland may not change much in a hundred years, the shape of the water crests surrounding it change all the time. And even if you are just looking for the shape of Greenland, a picture does it much better than painting.

This kind of macro photography lends itself to people with satellites or very high vantage points, so it's out of the hands of the average artist, unless you know someone running the controls and you can convince them to scan over the Alps just for you.

At the other end of the spectrum is micro photography, or using scanning electron microscopes to take photographs of miniscule structures. There are many web sites out there if you search for Scanning Electron Microscope in a search engine, but one site I recommend to look at is http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/.

The site may be confusing at first because there is plenty of text and few pictures of what you would expect but, look the Powers of Ten link and let it load fully. Also look at Phytochemicals (on the left side navigation bar) and scroll to the bottom of the page. There you will see many name of chemicals, click on a few to see what they look like.

This is like the satellite photography in that many of us simply don't have access to the equipment needed to produce these kinds of images. However taking the ideas and textures of these images we can produce the same kinds of concepts. You could for instance take any picture and take a small portion of that picture and magnify it digitally. Then again, and again, and again. At each step in the process you can modify the result a little to enhance that particular aspect of the image portion, either in color or sharpness or outlining the important parts.

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