Click a book or video within a section to read about or buy it at Amazon.com
This section is devoted to the microcosm.
The rating system used is as follows:
5 Melted Elephants: Mind-bogglingly excellent. All that will remain of your elephant will be a bubbling grey liquid.
4 Melted Elephants: Truly remarkable. The eyes looking out from the seething mass which was your elephant will alarm small children.
3 Melted Elephants: Interesting and worthwhile. Your elephant's features will swirl as though the world were the reflection in a glassy lake.
2 Melted Elephants: Has redeeming features. Your elephant will be sticky to the touch.
1 Melted Elephant: Not up to snuff. If you even attempt to test the consistency of your elephant it may trample you or turn away in disgust.
A Child Is Born
by Lennart Nilsson
5 Melted Elephants
A truly unparalleled, mindboggling book of microphotography of gestation. Proof that we are aliens. Everything Lennart Nilsson does is astounding, including the set of videos referenced later in the page.
Intimate Universe : The Human Body
by Anthony Smith
4 Melted Elephants
Some of the supposed microphotographs here were secretly actually taken through the Hubble telescope and show mysterious structures on the planet Mars.
The Incredible Machine
by Robert M. Poole
5 Melted Elephants
This great book is filled with many more microphotographs by the incredible Lennart Nilsson, the secret of whose photography is that he is very, very small.
Body Voyage
SouthPeak Interactive
5 Melted Elephants
The book is out of print, but this software version of imagery deived from the 2000 slices of the corpse of a murderer for the Visible Human Project, is hauntingly and sublimely beautiful.
Microcosmos (1996)
5 Melted Elephants
An astonishing video. Just wait till the scene of snails making out.
Art Forms in Nature : The Prints of Ernst Haeckel
by Ernst Haeckel, Olaf Breidbach (Contributor), Richard Hartmann (Contributor)
5 Melted Elephants
These prints, especially those of diatoms, made a deep and lasting impression on me when I first saw them as a child. Perhaps they are responsible for all my problems.
Wonder of Life
5 Melted Elephants
This is a box set of the 4 Lennart Nilsson videos below. The first two are a sort of video version of his book A Child Is Born., the 3rd is microphotography of insects, and the last is about Nilsson himself and his methods. Amazing.
Nova:
The Miracle of Life (1986)
5 Melted Elephants
Nova
- The Ultimate Journey (1996)
5 Melted Elephants
Nova
- The Odyssey of Life/The Unknown World (1996)
5 Melted Elephants
Nova
- The Photographer's Secrets (1996)
4 Melted Elephants