Anatomy and Art

Monash University in Australia is releasing their new 3D printed anatomy series.  The press release is here… http://www.monash.edu.au/news/show/3d-printed-anatomy-to-mark-a-new-era-for-medical-training

And if you can access the full article, more details about it are published here…
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ase.1475/abstract

And I first heard about it through Meddeviceonline’s article which contains the following photo.  If that is an actual comparison of cadaver and the plastic version being made by Monash, well that’s really impressive…
http://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/world-s-first-d-printed-cadaver-could-revolutionize-medical-education-0001

Most of these articles talk about the value of having these models as a replacement for human dissection all together in classes.  I don’t think that a complete replacement will ever be a good idea, certainly not anytime soon.  But a really accurate model like this, could be incredibly valuable used in addition to cadaver studies.  Which leaves me wondering exactly how they’re getting it.

The abstract of the scholarly article mentions injecting contrast into specific anatomy to highlight it for the scans.  That would certainly help, but I’ve seen enough CT data to know that it’s going to come out with a lot of mess too.  Whoever is going through and isolating this piece from that and isolating the model is doing a fine job of it.  That’s for sure.

I’ve had a bit of  fascination for the last couple of years with the idea of making educational models that can be printed out in 3D on the user’s part.  This is definitely more complicated than that, and they are not suggesting that students try to print their own.  But I feel like that’s around the corner.  And it’s exciting.

Well, I did it!  I finally bought a new DSLR camera to replace the Canon 20D taken by the burglars in February.  I know that I wrote about the shopping process a bit in my last post.  Well, I wound up going with the Pentax K3.  It’s amazing.  Not only has camera technology come a long way in the twelve or so years that I’d had my old camera, but Pentax has apparently been making some of the hardiest cameras around for a long time now.  It sounds like I can take this thing out into a rainstorm, dust storm, let it knock about a bit, and it’ll just keep working.

I once again have three lenses.  Somehow I always wind up with three.  In my film days with my old Pentax K1000, I had a wide angle lens, a standard lens, and a telephoto lens.  With my Canon20D I had a standard /zoom, a telephoto, and a macro lens.  Well this time I definitely wanted another macro lens.  Then instead of going standard/ zoom I went more telephoto light, which serves a similar niche with more zoom than my old standard /zoom but not as much as my old telephoto.  I think it’ll be fun to have that go between there though.  And then lastly, I picked up a fisheye as my specialty lens, and I love it!

To show off these lovely lenses, I’ll have to utilize the help of my lovely assistant, Rocky the Dog…

First we have the macro lens, and man do I love these things.  Getting closer to your subject you get a narrower and narrower depth of field, which means you have to get the focus right, but when you do, the attention goes right there.

Next that basic lens that is standard enough at 55, but telephoto enough at 200 too.

And lastly, we have the fisheye.  And can I just say… so… much… fun…

I think that this new camera and I are gong to get along very well.  And to anyone out there camera shopping, let me give you a nudge towards Pentax.  They always made a good solid film camera, and I didn’t know it until recently, but they really have kept innovating into the digital world.  The K3 is a brilliant camera.  But I even considered their lower end K-50 as well.  This brand is well worth a look if you’re in the market.

It’s been about five months now, since I last owned my SLR still cameras.  It was about the end of February when my house was burglarized and both my Pentax K1000 and Canon 20D were stolen right in the camera bags I kept them in with all accompanying lenses and general accessories (filters, extra batteries for the digital camera, extra film for the film camera).  And it’s been weird.  I’m so used to having them.  I didn’t use the Pentax often anymore, but I learned on that camera and I’ve always appreciated knowing that I could when worthy situations or ideas arise.  And the Canon, well that’s the camera that finally sold me on the capability of digital photography.  At first I was very careful with it.  Then I started taking that camera all over, even to Burning Man.  I’ve worked and played with that camera.  But most of all, it’s just been there so long.  Part of why I haven’t replaced it yet is that the way USAA’s home insurance works is that the longer you’ve had a thing, the less they actually give you for it until you’ve replaced it.  So having a house full of goods to try and replace, and a whole lot of hassle with faxing receipts and endless phone tag after every purchase to get the rest of my reimbursement, it made financial sense to do things in a certain order, so as not to be out so much all at once.  My cameras are by far the most expensive thing taken from my house.  Well, technically my burglars came back and stole my car about a month later, but if we’re specifying *inside* the house, then it was the cameras.  I did get that car back, for the record.

Anyway, here I am, roughly five months later, about ready to finally replace my digital camera and lenses.  I’m probably going to go Canon again, though having a clean wipe on past equipment like this does make one think about the potential for starting fresh in another line entirely.  Sony is apparently getting into the camera game and pulling some professional photographers over to that side.  Nikon has always been a strong contender, and I believe that they are still the only company to make flat lenses, which could be helpful for shooting paintings or if I ever got a set up to shoot slides with a microscope.  But the main contender just now is the Canon 70D.  It seems the most similar to what I had, with some nice boosts to performance.  Then again, with as often as I find myself shooting in low light, I might do well to pick up something with a full frame sensor.  If I’m sticking with Canon, that would probably be the 6D which is more expensive, but certainly more affordable than Nikon’s D4.

One thing that I’m noticing in all of these new camera models is that they’re all trying to offer wireless connectivity now and synching with your smart phone, which while I like the idea of a remote, I always kind of appreciated that my real cameras didn’t upload to Facebook at a whim’s notice.  Sometimes the idea is to do it right and go through your images later, tweaking where necessary and only publish what still feels right the next day.  I dunno.  It’s not like they make you use that stuff, but it does seem a little excessive, and potentially like killer of battery life, which I do care very much about.

Anyways, I’ll have to pick something soon.  I am feeling myself done with my time away from camera ownership, and I want back in to what really is one of my primary art forms.  And really, I’ve been overcompensating with my iPhone in the interim.  And on that note I leave you with just such an iPhone photo of my and my little dog, because I just keep taking these, and because I caught a cute one.  Actually the iPhone really does have an impressive camera for what it is.  And it’s been nice exploring that.  But give me back my lenses!

A couple years ago, I painted this on a carefully selected canvas that I bought at Hobby Lobby.  At the time, I felt like a jerk for ever feeling suspicious that a Christian affiliated company might be more inclined to support unethical causes.  But I didn’t want any bad juju in my art, so I looked them up online and found out a little about what kinds of charitable donations they were making.  And I remember being relieved.  Having grown up in Texas, I’d seen some businesses that seemed nice turn out to be giving money to causes that I find abhorrent and those choices were always explained as being based in Christianity.  Now when I left Texas for a little over a decade, I found such impressions softened. Conversations about religion didn’t feel so political and even highly devout Christian friends just never felt like they were attacking for their beliefs.  They were just their beliefs.  And removed from the pressures of the bible belt they were often beautiful to hear about.  When I returned to Texas, I noticed that controversial nature of religion rising again.  When people were bussed in to the capitol to protest women’s access to abortion in this state, I saw that ugly threatening side of religion all over again.  And now, here’s this business that maybe leans a little heavily on cheap Chinese manufacturing, but across the board seemed to be pretty ethical and even really nice.  They put money into things like building houses for the poor.  And I bought this canvas there.  And I made this art that is largely a celebration of femininity and womanhood.  And then Obamacare goes through and Hobby Lobby becomes the poster child for businesses that want to claim a religious right to deny women their full health care coverage and yet not pay the taxes for not providing full benefits.  And then yesterday that actually passes in the Supreme Court.  And so this company, that was at one time kind of a symbol to me of religious influence in a corporation being just fine, and even doing good in the world, like the way I thought it was supposed to work when I was a kid, wages war against equal compensation for women for the work that they do.  And it does so at the level of health care, which just makes the attack feel so much more personal.  I am so very disappointed by my government for the decision made by the Supreme Court yesterday, but I am also disappointed in Hobby Lobby itself.  I grew up believing that it was wrong to succumb to prejudice about others’ religion.  But in this time of holy wars and tea party/ republican invasion I can’t help wondering if it’s even possible not to take on such prejudice.  Such walls don’t seem like the answer.  And yet, as a woman of today, I can’t help but feel under attack.  Being back in Texas no doubt exacerbates this feeling.  And tonight I find myself looking at this painting that I still have and thinking about the relationships between being, and politics, and religion, and money, and art.  My very existence as a woman in this world is somehow controversial in ways, and that’s not new, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.  I also don’t see it being exclusive to women.  We just happen to be particularly under the political spotlight just now.  I guess such experiences are why we have so many conversations about privilege.

Anyway, I realize that this is a bit of a controversial topic to come back on after some down time not posting.  It’s been a hectic couple of months filled with crime, and death, and bureaucracy, and just lately camping, and catching up socially, and I suppose this week involves an introspective political rage.  I suppose I’m not far off from where I was last year, coming up on another 4th of July in just the days after watching my supposed political representatives fight to make women’s lives that much more dangerous and unpredictable.