Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image

by Felice Frankel

Science and engineering research must be communicated within the research community and to the general public, and a crucial element of that communication is visual. In Envisioning Science, science photographer Felice Frankel provides a guide to creating dynamic and compelling photographs for journal submissions and for scientific presentations to funding agencies, investors, and the general public. The book is organized from the large to the small, from pictures of new material and biological structures made with a camera and lens, to images made with a stereomicroscope, compound microscope, and scanning electron microscope (SEM). The text explains how to design, craft, and execute effective images, SEMs, and diagrams while maintaining scientific integrity. Full-color illustrations, including many instructional side-by-side comparisons, provide examples from the physical and biological sciences, biotechnology, nanotechnology, electrical engineering, materials science, and mechanical engineering to encourage a new way to see and create images of science.

Genres: Science

335 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2002

About the author

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Chemical Engineering with additional support from Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. She joined MIT in 1994.

Felice is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Initiative for Innovative Computing (IIC), and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology.

She developed and instructed the first online MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) for edX addressing science and engineering photography, “Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work” (course 0.111x). The course’s 34 tutorials and supplemental materials are available on MIT OpenCourseWare.

In 2001, Felice founded the Image and Meaning workshops and conferences whose purpose was to develop new approaches to promote the public understanding of science through visual expression. She was also principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded program, “Picturing to Learn”, an effort to study how making representations by students, aids in teaching and learning science.


Exhibition at the New York Hall of Science.
Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, her images have appeared in outlets such as Nature, Science, JACS, PNAS, Langmuir, Joule, National Geographic, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science, and New Scientist, among others.

Additionally, Felice has been profiled in the New York Times, WIRED, Life, Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Science Friday”, and various European publications. Her limited-edition photographs are included in a number of corporate and private collections, and her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including at the Kennedy Center Arts Summit (“Wonder”), Museum of Modern Art (“Design and the Elastic Mind”), New York Hall of Science, and along the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and as a traveling exhibition supported by Bracco Imaging Group in Italy, including Genoa, Rome, Naples, Perugia, Milano, and New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò.

Reviews

[Chris Leuchtenburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good, fundamental information with some useful tips even for a non-scientist photographer such as myself. Very cool photos of very small things.