Addendum on National Geographic imagery

["Mickey Rowe;893-2446" <mrowe@lifesci.ucsb.edu>]

I've just received a message from the editor who earlier solicited my
advice for the National Geographic image of the Temnodontosaurus
eye.  She pointed out a few ways that they did take my advice in
going from earlier drafts to the final image.

One particularly interesting bit of information...  the glint off of
the eye was not supposed to be from reflected sunlight.  They accepted
my arguments that at the depth the animal was supposed to feed, there
would be almost no direct sunlight to cause such a glint, and that if
the animal were high enough in the water column for that argument not
to hold, then the pupil would have been much smaller.

The light source that they used to generate the pattern of light in
the image was envisioned by the artists as though it were a flashlight
in the hand of the observer.  That makes the image a bit more
realistic, if you'll grant them the artistic license that any image
they'd get of such a scene could only have been acquired with the aid
of artificial lighting.  Anyways, it was this artificial light source
that produced the glint.

I haven't heard explicitly on this point, but knowing there was
artificial light used in the generation of the image of that eye
reinforces my belief that the artists intended the other image I
mentioned in:

http://dml.cmnh.org/2005Dec/msg00347.html

to have been created with the aid of a flash as I suggested.

I feel better about it all.  See, Ken?  I can be brought around.

-- 
Mickey P. Rowe     (mrowe@lifesci.ucsb.edu)