IAS Aroid Quasi Forum

About Aroid-L
 This is a continuously updated archive of the Aroid-L mailing list in a forum format - not an actual Forum. If you want to post, you will still need to register for the Aroid-L mailing list and send your postings by e-mail for moderation in the normal way.

  Re: [Aroid-l] Colour Pictures in Aroideana
From: Theodore Held <oppenhauser2001 at gmail.com> on 2011.11.21 at 19:56:32(22363)
Well, the color issue has certainly been interesting. Here are three comments.

1. From an amateur's point of view, a color picture is better than a black and white one. In the old days of real film, black and white came equipped with much better detail and resolution than color. But now a digital photo is a digital photo. On a same-pixel basis, detail is the same, technically. But color shows things that B+W cannot. Like color, for instance. And there's no doubt that the public likes color pictures better.

2. The value of a picture for taxonomic purposes is based on the skill of the photographer. Many small details cannot be photographed with your standard hand-held. You need a dissecting scale microscope (10 X to 100X) and you need to know how to do it. Since most people don't have the equipment or the skill, pictures tend to be useless, as has been pointed out. For my money I'd put up a skillful photomicrograph against most of the line drawings I have seen. And the cost per picture (assuming one already has the stuff) is very low.

3. There is still a role for line drawings. Showing the emergence of a feature, for example. Or showing an overlay structure that would be obscured by the background. Or detailing a time-lapse characteristic. None of these are best suited to photography.

I don't see any reason (other than cost, obviously) to favor B+W over color in a publication like Aroideana.

Ted Held.

HTML

+More

Note: this is a very old post, so no reply function is available.