For a century the dental image has lived behind glass—on film, on a lightbox, on a monitor. Augmented reality proposes something stranger and older: to lift the scan off the screen and hang it, weightless and registered, inside the patient's own head....
A black contrastor does more than tidy the frame. It removes the mouth from the picture so the tooth can finally be seen for what it is: a translucent object of light....
A radiograph is nearly blind to a hairline fracture that runs with the light rather than across the beam. Transillumination answers the question a flat X-ray cannot: shine light through the tooth, and the crack reveals itself. Here is the craft of capturing it....
The occlusal view is one of the hardest intraoral photographs to make well: a full arch, seen through a mirror, in perfect focus and free of fog. Here is the craft behind it — mirror choice, angulation, retraction, and the small habits that turn a...
The occlusal view is one of the hardest intraoral photographs to make well: a full arch, seen through a mirror, in perfect focus and free of fog. Here is the craft behind it — mirror choice, angulation, retraction, and the small habits that turn a...
The temporomandibular joint is the one structure in the mouth that refuses to sit still for its portrait. It is part bone and part soft cartilage, it works as a matched pair, and it is defined by movement - three properties that no single imaging...
A cone-beam scanner does not, strictly speaking, take a picture. It measures a dense three-dimensional block of numbers - a volume - and every flat image a clinician actually looks at is a decision made afterward about how to collapse that block onto a screen....
Almost every clinical photograph of a smile is a single, held instant - the posed, static frame we ask the patient to freeze into. But a real smile is not a pose; it is a movement, a brief and asymmetric event that begins at repose...
In late July 2026, Carestream Dental announced a strategic alliance with the ADA Forsyth Institute, sealed by the donation of a state-of-the-art cone-beam computed tomography system to the institute's clinical arm. It is easy to read that as a press release. It is more interesting...
Sharpness, exposure, and color get the attention, but the first decision in every clinical photograph is made before any of them: where to put the frame. Composition - what the picture includes, what it excludes, how it is centered and leveled - is the quiet...