Fall Colors - On a Small Scale

Eastfield College is located in north central Texas, which is not exactly known for its fall colors.  We have lots of yellows and browns (aka - dead leaves).  In fact, as I sit here this late afternoon and look out my office window, the colors aren't exactly inspiring. 

As I was walking on campus yesterday afternoon, however, I came across a Sweet Gum tree in one of our courtyards.  This time the colors did catch my attention.  (For those of you who work or study on campus, this tree is located in the courtyard formed by the S, C, and N Buildings.)

The following series of pictures were made with my little point and shoot digital camera.

 Looking East - the S Building in the background

 

Looking South - C Building in the background

In this image you can see the spiky fruit of the Sweet Gum tree

I was quite pleased that while I was taking these pictures the people who walked by actually looked up!  One of those people was a campus police officer who politely told me to stop walking around in the flower beds.

Of course they pay me the big bucks (I wish) to let people see the world from a different perspective, so instead of looking up, let's look down - specifically at the fallen leaves.

I didn't arrange the leaves in this shot.  I just looked down where I was standing and took the picture.

We may not have lots of trees with amazing fall colors, but what if we just looked at a single leaf - a change of perspective.



(No professional hand models were used for these images - those stubby fingers are mine.)

So now back to the lab for a closer look at different areas of single leaves.  The images below were made with the lab's digital dissecting scope.  I will admit that once I started looking closely at each leaf, I kept finding more and more areas to image.  I went a little wild so there are lots of images below.  I will let them speak for themselves.

Pretty and cool!  I also took about 30 images with the scanning electron microscope, but black and white images would seem out of place here.

Happy Fall!

Scanning Electron Microscope Lab

Eastfield College