Today for dinner my father and I prepared tahini. Because we made it from scratch we used sesame seeds, which we roasted, and ground together with a blender. We then added lemon and garlic to create the paste. Because a single sesame seed looks quite simple and insignificant, especially when there are so many of them, I thought it would be interesting to capture an image of a sesame seed under a microscope. Placing it under the 10x magnification lens I soon realized that if I want to capture an image revealing at least some of the seed’s details I would need to take the image in pieces and stitch it all together at the end. I ended up taking about fifteen photos of the seed from different positions, eventually using nine photos which were the sharpest. I tweaked the contrast, saturation, and sharpness in the hope of creating, as much as possible, a cohesive image. This is the result:
I noticed that on one side of the seed there is a line that passes down the center. I’m not sure what its function is. Perhaps this is where the seed was attached to its host plant. If one uses a bit of imagination, a whole image can be approximately constructed and the sesame seed can be viewed in an entirely new way: as a world in itself.
