You may not be able to paint like a great artist, but you can photograph like one. Optical scientist Jannick Rolland of the University of Central Florida and professional photographer Steve Hylen teamed up to create an etched camera lens that makes photos look like paintings. Hylen patterned the lens by trial and error, but Rolland is developing a mathematical technique to analyze a van Gogh or Monet and then etch the correct texture into the glass. "It won't be as good as a Monet, of course," says Rolland, "but the style is what we are trying to extract and encode."
