April 19: Your lens to the intern et's most powerful photographs. 📸

April 19: Week in Photography

Your lens to the internet's most powerful photographs.

📸 MOST POWERFUL PHOTO OF THE WEEK 📸

Joy Malone / Reuters

While some countries are cautiously looking to lift lockdown rules, the ideas of closeness, intimacy, and connection have already been transformed. Hashim, an essential worker in the health care industry, greets his daughter through the closed door as he maintains social distance from his family as he works amid the COVID-19 outbreak in New Rochelle, New York, April 11.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! 📸

Share your images of social distancing, springtime, and some of the feelings of being indoors for quarantine.

Images can be submitted here, and the most compelling picture will be shared in JPG in the coming weeks.

📸For Your 👀 Only:

SMALL WORLDS, BIG CONSEQUENCES

With the entire world shut down in response to a seemingly invisible enemy, the few photos that we have of the novel coronavirus seem both otherworldly and banal. How can something so small, so alien-seeming, wreak such havoc? The images that do exist are taken for granted, stand-ins that represent a slow-moving social and economic catastrophe. That images exist of the virus at all is remarkable — especially since they are illustrations. We spoke with Professor Michael Peres, who teaches biomedical photographic communications at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, to explain this technical process.

What are the steps it takes to make a picture of a virus?

Michael Peres: It's a process that starts out with the virus that is collected in some way shape or form, and taken to a place that’s safe. Ebola, SARS, HIV, and many other viruses that have infected humans are of course dangerous and the management of those viruses, dead or alive, is important.

So these viruses, if they’re looked at in a scanning electron microscope (SEM), they have the moisture removed, and then put in a vacuum chamber of some sort, which is part of the microscope, and then they are bombarded with electrons. The electrons reflect off the surface of the material, and then they are captured by a detector, and the detector forms an image that you can see and record, which is a monochromatic imaging process.

CDC / Getty Images

You have to be efficient, because these biological materials can’t be in a microscope and bombarded with electrons for infinite amounts of time without them changing or being destroyed.

With a scanning electron microscope you see the outsides of things, with a transmission electron microscope you can see the inside of things. To make a TEM work, scientists cut the virus in some way — you need to be highly precise and highly technical and use very sophisticated equipment to section it. Then certain types of heavy metals stains are added to it, so that it has a kind of density for electrons. Like light, heavy metals on a biological material block electrons or transmit electrons, leading to white regions of your image or dark regions of your image, which then of course is captured with digital technology.

Then you have the image, which is black and white, so you have the artist come in to add color called false or pseudo-colorizing color. People expect to see things in color. When we see grayscale images, there is an immediate feeling that they are uncommon.

So this is a super technical process that results in a drawing?

Yup! The microscope uses electrons, not light, and they can be super expensive; they have resolutions that are on the scale of nanostructure and are measured using Angstroms, super high-res instruments that can easily go to 100,000 times magnified. They look at things that are infinitely tiny, so tiny that you know on a light microscope if you were even able to detect one, that would be extraordinary.

Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images

If the EM images require further enlargement with clarity, there is now the need to make an illustration or a derivative piece based on what can be seen within the image. In the illustration, color and other elements of the drawing are somewhat speculative, because no one has actually seen the virus in color, the way that you’re seeing them illustrated. What we see is an interpretation of what we believe we saw in an image by a highly trained illustrator.

It's much different from illustrations in advertising. In advertising, an illustrator interprets a thing, and they try to make it look a certain way for sales or for emotional reasons. In science, you tell science facts, not science fiction, so the highly detailed illustrations are used to communicate information about what the actual virus really looks like.

What is the training?

Professional education in imaging is not at the same scale as you might expect. You don’t go to school really to be an electron microscopist. You don’t go to school to be a light microscopist. It’s a tool used in science and different organizations have different access to different equipment. It's often just on-the-job training, OJT. At RIT, we have a photographic sciences degree program where light and scanning electron microscopy are possible class choices.

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

So someone who is working on a master’s in biology might have access to a SEM or TEM or other cohorts in places called imaging centers. The highest number of scientists that are working probably don’t have any formal imaging training. Their craft is about science, and they use the microscope as a tool, like beakers.

What is the importance to science in seeing what the virus looks like?

I think, like any process, where people are learning new things, visualized data helps people to analyze and then deduce. It's like trying to describe a color in words, describe blue in words. You can’t do it. Pictures help a scientist describe a procedure or a process or an organism in a way that words would be woefully inadequate alone

These illustrations can help improve and better the science around these organisms by having some type of visual, so that the next study or antibody test or experiment can be based on knowledge.

I think it’s easy to look for photos and take for granted that there is a picture for everything, that we accept that this isn’t reality. It's a rendering.

U.S. National Institutes of Health via Getty Images

📸THE WEEK'S PHOTO STORIES FROM BUZZFEED NEWS 📸

This week, we see more closely the toll the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is taking on society — both economically and socially, from the view of health care workers, emergency responders, essential employees, and protesters. We also see tempers start to fray in the United States as ongoing lockdown measures hurt the economy. Finally, as a reminder of new beginnings, we take a look at the start of springtime around the world.

Find more of the week's best photo stories here.

PICTURES FROM THE FRONTLINES

John Moore / Getty Images

"I want these pictures and this story to be more than just statistics — I’d like people to really see what it looks like."

FREEDOM FROM QUARANTINE

Jeff Kowalsky / Getty Images

Conservative demonstrators gathered at the capitol buildings of Michigan, Kentucky, and North Carolina to protest against stay-at-home orders during a pandemic that has already left more than 26,000 Americans dead.

🌷SPRING IN BLOOM🌷

Michele Tantussi / Reuters

Take a mental pause from your self-quarantine with a breathtaking reminder that the natural world is still as beautiful as it ever was.

📸YOUR WEEKLY PALATE CLEANSER 📸

Patrick Smith / Getty Images

Best to stay busy when at home bored! Adhering to Ohio's stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus outbreak, Zachary Skidmore bench-presses using his handmade outdoor gym equipment on April 15 in Jackson, Ohio. Skidmore, a former US Army police officer and part-time personal trainer, constructed his “Lumber Jacked Gym” entirely out of timber over a two-week period. The seven-station setup, which includes a cable fly machine, bench press, treadmill, and leg press, was designed as a way to help him stay fit during the COVID-19 pandemic — which shut down his local gym — and landed him at his parent’s home for the quarantine.

"That's it from us this time — see you next week!" —Gabriel and Kate

📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Gabriel Sanchez is the photo essay editor based in New York and loves cats. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. You can always reach us here.
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