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.