Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Simulated Bee Vision IV - Buttercup (Caltha palustris)

Today it is again about Bee Vision. The buttercups are in full blossom here and these flowers show some very prominent UV pattern which is completely invisible to the eye, so I took some shots to demonstrate that:

These first two images are the visual



and the reflected ultraviolet (310 ... 390nm) shot:




This following image now combines the visible and UV shot into a synthesized "Bee Vision Image" and  is the non-linear color mapping into our human color space. UV, which a bee can see is compressed into our visible spectrum as blue, at the same time the red, a bee can't see, is suppressed:



This, of course, is just my personal representation of what I believe respresents what a bee may see (aside from the aspect of a completely different optical apparatus of course...), transformed into our human color space.

Stay tuned, more will follow on that fascinating subject...

More info on this very interesting field may be found on my site http://www.pbase.com/kds315/uv_photos