Andrea Ottesen is a Winner

Andrea Otteson has been featured in this blog in the past. She is a scientific illustrator and scientist, who combines a great eye and an understanding of what information is to be conveyed, with a mastery of the technique of digital photography. She has just had a cover of Science magazine in recognition of her tie for first place in the photography category of the National Science Foundation/Science 2007 Visualization Challenge.

Here is the Science description of the photo:

The slimy, glistening mass of seaweed washed up on a sandy beach seems light-years distant from this feathery, dendritic image of Irish moss (Chondrus crispus) created by Andrea Ottesen, a botanist and molecular ecologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. "If you pull Chondrus out of the ocean, it's folded on itself--really curled up," she says. It wasn't until after she had "pressed every one of those little ends down with sea stones" and left it to dry for 2 days that the seaweed's beautiful, simple shape was revealed.

Ottesen uses only a black background, a Canon ELPH 7-megapixel digital point-and-shoot camera, and natural lighting to photograph many of the plants she encounters in her work. Her winning photo shows a piece of Irish moss she collected off the coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, while cataloging the use of kelp products as fertilizers for a sustainable agriculture experiment. "You can get just as good light--or even better--with natural light" than with strobes and spotlights, she says.

The 15-centimeter-wide red algae seems exotic in this abstract portrait, but it is ubiquitous both in nature and in our day-to-day lives. Besides being one of the most common seaweed species on the Atlantic coast, says Ottesen, Irish moss and algae like it are sources of natural thickeners and stabilizers called carrageenans, which are widely used in processed foods as diverse as lunch meat and ice cream.

"There was this gasp when this photo came up on the screen," says panel of judges member Felice Frankel. "We shouldn't forget that we don't need [complex equipment and techniques] to create beautiful representations."