Case Study: Mississippi-Lungs

Image Discussion

In the image, Mississippi-Lungs, I downloaded a Landsat Thematic Mapper image of the Mississippi delta and imported it into the Idrisi image processing system. In Idrisi I created a false color image (RGB432) and then brought the image into Photoshop where I cut and mirrored the image and converted it to a black and white palette. When people view this image it acts like a psychology ink blotch where people see a variety of things. Most people think that it is some kind of biological scan, like human lungs. Most are rather shocked when they find out that the image covers hundreds of miles of terrain. It forces people to think of scales and patterns in new ways.

Figure 1.

Mississippi-Lungs