The Science of Color

The photograph above was found at this site and was taken by Olivier Le Queinec. The second photograph was taken by myself in response to the first photograph. What struck me about the first photograph was the combination of science (in the former of the beakers) and color (shades of orange and yellow). Having seen bottles containing chemicals of a wide variety of colors in my research lab, ranging from green to yellow to purple, I wanted to replicate this photo using a chemical used in my own research. I used a chemical called toluidine blue, which produces a very distinctive blue dark blue color and is used to stain the cells of some of our samples. In order to achieve the progressively lighter blues, I added 5 drops to the foremost beaker, 3 drops to the next two, and one drop the rightmost beaker and diluted with additional water as necessary, in order to produce sufficiently different colors. Whereas the four beakers in Mr. Le Queinec's photograph are all slightly different, while I maintain the darkest shade in the foreground, the colors become progressively lighter as one moves back (moving from a dark blue to almost cerulean to a very pale blue). Furthermore, whereas Mr. Le Queinec used different sizes of beakers, I used solely 250 mL beakers to further connect the four beakers with each other.