Multimedia Gallery
"Alcian and alizarin chameleon"
"Alcian and alizarin chameleon," by Elizabeth Marchiondo, photographer.
Photographer Elizabeth Marchiondo doesn't often have the opportunity to handle organisms as delicate as this chameleon. "I'm used to photographing live aquarium scum through a microscope or wading through a lagoon to capture specimens," she says. So Marchiondo was delighted when zoologist Andrew Gillis donated the deceased creature to Brian Hall's lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was a microscopy intern. Gillis had prepped the chameleon by dipping it in chemicals that rendered its skin and muscles transparent, and then stained its bones and joints with dyes. Because it was a 3-D subject, Marchiondo focused her digital camera on different planes of the chameleon's body and then stitched 32 images together to create a single, crisp picture.
The image won people's choice in the photography category of the 2015 Visualization Challenge, now called The Vizzies, a long-running, annual competition co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Popular Science. [The competition was formerly named the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (SciVis) and was previously co-sponsored with AAAS' journal Science.] The competition aims to recognize some of the most beautiful visualizations from the worlds of science and engineering and awards prizes in five categories: photography, video, illustration, posters & graphics and interactives.
To learn more about the competition and view all the winning entries past and present, see the NSF The VIZZIES: Visualization Challenge Special Report. (Date of Image: unknown)
Credit: Elizabeth Marchiondo and Andrew Gillis
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