Botany undergrad from California

[kylenessen]

Hello!

 

My name is Kyle and I'm very pleased to be joining this community. As stated in the title, I am an undergraduate student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo pursuing botany and its relevant ecology. I work closely with two of the botany professors here and their graduate students. Unwittingly, I've become the resident "expert" in UV photography, which is in large part thanks to the knowledge shared here. I, by no means, consider myself an expert however and welcome greatly a community where I can ask for help in overcoming the innumerable stumbling blocks this field can present.

 

I've recently started exploring multispectral imaging with the help of this useful plugin for ImageJ (Image Analysis Tools). It allows for objective reflectance measurements and can also correct for differences in sensitivities for other animals. I have only scratched the surface and use it primarily to combine UV images with the visible. Below is a recent picture of Lupinus succulentus where I've combined green, blue and UV. In order to "translate" bee vision to our own, I left blue and green as they are in order to preserve the overlap but assigned the UV channel to our red sensitivities. I later selectively adjusted the red channel to appear more purple for clarity.

 

Producing these images have opened up a number of ecological questions that I would like to explore using this technology, but help is needed to get to a point where my images are suitable for science. I look forward to any feedback on my own work and that of the software I use. I also hope to prove to be some use to the community as well.

 

Cheers,

Kyle

[Bill De Jager]

Welcome, Kyle! This is a great place for botanists.

[colinbm]

Welcome to UVP Kyle, the Image Analysis Tool looks interesting, & the video is fantastic.

Another you might find useful is WaveLengthPro,

Daniel there is very helpful.

Cheers

Col

[Andrea B.]

Hello Kyle and welcome to UVP. I hope you can find some interesting discussions here about insect vision and other UV topics.

 

Two of our members posting about bee vision are Zach Huang, a professor from Michigan State's Department of Entomology and Nico Chalwatzis, a teacher from Bensheim, Germany. And of course Bjørn Rørslett has been making bee vision photos since the first days of digital photography.

 

There are, of course, significant problems to overcome in modeling insect vision with digital photographic techniques. But that doesn't stop us all from enjoying the effort and trying to implement a good model of bee vision. So far there have been two approaches: mixed UV/visible channel stacking in a photo editor and UV-Blue-Green filter stacks on a UV-capable camera/lens. You will find some results of both types here on UVP.

 

BTW, modeling insect vision with channel stacks or filter stacks is not a new thing, and nobody here pioneered those techniques. I have found papers from way back where both channel stacks and filter stacks were used - even in the film days. However, now that we have digital photography, both techniques are very much easier.

 

This summer I began using a UG5 + S8612 filter, very popular amongst those interested in bee vision. I will try to add more of my results soon. This filter stack worked pretty well. For purple, yellow and white flowers the results were very good. But I had trouble with red & orange flowers that I'm not sure how to resolve just yet.

 

To find more here on UVP on the terms "insect vision", "bee vision" and "bee colours", if you haven't already. "-)

 

(Note: You can stack uv and visible images in photoshop. Special software is not really needed, although it can make the job easier sometimes.)

[nfoto]

Welcome to our small corner of the vast cyberspace.

 

Andrea correctly stated you can get similar results either by stacking images, or by stacking filters. There is one caveat one should keep in mind though. The interchannel weighting is largely ignored or overlooked when partial images are stacked, whilst there is an implicit differential weighting of the channels through the design of of the "BUG" filter types (typically a stack of UG5 + S8612 in various thickness). The spectral quality of the light source commonly is ignored for both approaches or at best, assumed to be "daylight".

 

Stacking of partial images might provide the visually most pleasing results, but can be harder to interpret in a biological context. In contrast, the output from the various "bee vision" filters are in general less visually attractive, but (just?) might be easier to understand biologically. Or so am told.

[igoriginal]

Welcome to UVP, by the way, Kyle!

[Andrea B.]

EDITOR'S NOTE: I have split off the technical discussion about BUG filter types from this Introduce Yourself section and moved it to UV/IR Techniques and Tests.

LINKIE: Discussion: UG5 + IR-Cut Filter Stack

[kylenessen]

Thank you all for the warm welcome!! I'm immediately richer by simply introducing myself. Looking forward to talking with all of you in the forums.