Engineering Photography Beautifully Reveals the Intersection of Science and Art

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From images of graphene flowers and foam to a portrait of a self-taught engineer fixing one of his elephant pumps that is providing clean water for a village in Malawi, the winning images and other impressive entrants in the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering’s photography competition beautifully illustrate how art, science, and humanity mesh.

Each of the winning entrants are pictured above and below, and in the video below, the photographers responsible talk you through how they captured these works of art:

Several of the images/videos look like something out of a CGI artist’s imagination, but each is a real photograph (sometimes with color added) or video of a process at work.

Blue lights on top of green grass are actually human mesenchymal stem cells attached to fibrin. What might be a thick brush stroke of red paint on a black canvas is actually, “the edge of a Mode II crack; a phenomenon rarely seen in glass.” And machine learning expands van Gogh’s Starry Night far beyond its borders.

Carbon nanotubes made a strong showing in the competition, but we’ve left the descriptions out of the images so that your imagination can try to guess at what you’re looking at below:

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To see the images in higher resolution, or read the detailed descriptions, head over to the Cambridge Department of Engineering’s Flickr album for the 2014 competition by clicking here.

(via Mashable)


Image credits: Photographs courtesy of the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering.

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