Front cover of Molecular Solar Fuels book

An image of mine appears on the brand new book on Molecular Solar Fuels, to be published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (2012). You can find out more about the book here:

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/eBook/9781849733038

and you can find it on Amazon. With many thanks to Warwick Hillier!!

Mimivirus image published in Italy

My mimivirus image appears in the Italian edition of Scientific American, Le Sienza.

Anaglyphs: new stereoscopic science images available

New high resolution anaglyphs (stereoscopic 3D images) are available on my gallery site.  The images are up to 5000 pixels across, making them ideal for large museum exhibits. There are molecules, DNA, viruses, and even mathematical figures. If you order from this site you will download TIFFs (it is crucial to have very high-quality images for anaglyphs to work properly).

Anaglyphs are great fun and ideal for science-based novelties or children's science books. They are particularly useful for scientific subjects since they help the viewer to see unfamiliar structures in three dimensions.

If you see one of my images that you'd like rendered as an anaglyph, please let me know.

You need red-green or red-cyan glasses to see the 3D effect. You can check them out on the web for their 3D effect if you have suitable glasses. You can buy such glasses from specialist opticians or you can get cheap red-green filters in many 3D books.

To find out more about stereoscopic images see my rkm3D site where there is a section explaining how anaglyphs work.

How much should illustrators / designers / photographers / charge per hour?

It's a vexed question. Charge too much and you don't get the work. Charge too little and you hate yourself  (whether you get the job or not). To help make things a little more rigorous, I created a calculator to compute hourly pay rates based on an estimated annual salary. You can put in the salary that you think is reasonable (say the local average wage), fill out the other bits and then see what pops out. Remember that this rate is for billable hours only (4 hours per day?). If you were pitching for a job, you might price for the whole thing but you should still have an hourly rate at the back of your mind. You can use this calculator for any type of work, really. Even though I wrote it, I was surprised at how much one must charge just to hope to make a basic wage.......