This project looking at developing materials to support the identification of hairs of British species of animals is a collaboration between David Bryson (Photography), Dr Nel Beaumont (School of Biology, Forensics and Sport) and Steve Docker (Derbyshire Mammal Group). The initial stage is looking at whole hairs through stitching together series of photographs using photomicroscopy towards creating a working methodology for the project specimens.

The problem with stitching together photographs, to show whole hairs, is looking at the number needed. The initial samples, see pages for the Otter and Pine Marten, involved stitching 63 photographs together. Even where the photographs were reduced to jpgs then stitched the larger images had to be saved as Large format in PhotoShop .psb files and when converted to tifs were from 1.6 - 2 Gb in size. Reducing them too far would lose detail when zooming in so the work at this stage is towards working out how close to go with magnification and what resolution is needed for the final versions so that enough detail can be seen without having to load a very large file. The current pages are using a flash viewer called Zoomify Express http://www.zoomify.com/.

The photograph opposite is a close-up from the hair of an Otter.

One of the intriguing things about scientific work is that when trying different techniques you often see something very unexpected. The fluoresence of different types of nuts is intersteing so next step as with the photographs above was to photograph different types of nougat.

My current work is moving in several directions:

Forensic photography

• Use of infrared for the detection of underlying tattoos where there have been cover-up tattoos.
• Use of implants to support identification http://www.opsit.org.uk.
• Paper being submitted to Fingerprint Whorld following a presentation at the Fingerprint Society seminar in June 2009.

Scientific and technical photography

• Uses of software to create panoramas and high resolution images
• The Hairs project looking at stitching whole hairs for identification is an example of the application of stitching in a scientific context.

Continuous Professional Development

• Development of materials to support Learning and CPD for the Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine the journal of the Institute of Medical Illustrators.
• Recent version about 'Adding Variety to Your Learning Activities'. Free online http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/17453054.2010.481781