After seeing a recent in-house promotional brochure, I’d like to issue a brief request on behalf of my fellow researchers. This is addressed to all professional photographers: please, no more colored spotlights.

I know that you see this as a deficiency, but scientists do not work with purple radiance coming from the walls behind them. Not if we can help it, we don’t, and if we notice that sort of thing going on, we head for the exits. In the same manner, our instruments do not, regrettably, emit orange glows that light our faces up from beneath, not for the most part, and if they start doing that we generally don’t bend closer so as to emphasize the thoughtful contours of our faces. When we hold up Erlenmeyer flasks to eye level to see the future of research in them, which we try not to do too often because we usually don’t want to know, rarely is this accompanied by an eerie red light coming from the general direction of our pockets. It’s a bad sign when that happens, actually.

I know that your photos have lots more zing and pop the way you do them. And I’m sorry, for you and for the art department, that our labs are all well lit (with boring old fluorescent lights, yet), and that we all wear plain white lab coats (which tend to take over the picture), and that our instrument housings are mostly beige and blue and white. It would be a lot easier on you guys if these things weren’t so.

But that’s how it is. And when you get right down to it, you’re actually doing us a disservice by trying to pretend that there’s all sorts of dramatic stuff going on, that discoveries are happening every single minute of the day and that they’re accompanied by dawn-of-a-new-era lighting and sound effects. We’d rather that people didn’t get those ideas, because the really big discoveries aren’t like that at all. It doesn’t make for much of a cover shot, but if one of us ever does manage to change the world, it’ll start with a puzzled glance at a computer screen, or a raised eyebrow while looking at a piece of paper. Instead of getting noisier, everything will get a lot quieter. And if there are any purple spotlights to be seen, we won’t even notice them. . .

Update: A follow-up post is here, written after several comments by photographers came in. . .