Walking into the personal office of Eva Pell, vice president for research, visitors probably notice hanging along a wall six flowers, carefully pressed and individually placed under the glass of a frame.

But looks can be deceiving. The brilliantly colored and crisp images of the flowers are just that: an image. They are the digital masterpieces of husband-and-wife team Gerald Lang and Jennifer Tucker.

"People who are very knowledgeable, they look sideways at the print to look at the dimensionality of the pressed flowers," said Lang, professor of art and director of the Digital Photography Studio.

After looking at these images of flowers local to the Northeast, it is not surprising that so many people are fooled. In reality, however, the flowers are simply digital pictures printed onto paper.

The crystal-clear portraits are part of The Botanical Series, a result of Lang and Tucker's artistic imagination and the technology available to them in the Digital Photography Studio. A few prints are currently on display at the Zoller Gallery.

"It began four years ago, spring 1997," Lang said of the studio, adding that it is an academic and research program for the School of Visual Arts. "Its intent is to be on the leading edge of digital imaging technology."

Receiving support from companies such as Eastman Kodak, the studio is the workplace for many students' projects in digital photography.

"It's essentially taking what's high level digital photography equipment and finding out what it'll do," Lang said.

Lang's and Tucker's own work began two years ago. Tucker, a 1975 Penn State M.F.A. graduate and an herbalist for 20 years, teaches the Herbal Studies Program at Mt. Nittany Institute of Natural Health, 301 Shiloh Road.

Originally, the idea was to photograph flowers for identification purposes. "It would be helpful for me for my students to identify plants," Tucker said. So she took some local flowers, scanned them with Lang in the Digital Photography Studio, and printed the images on high quality paper.

Soon, however, Tucker and Lang, both long-time avid photographers, found art in their botanical endeavors.

"I think how our botanicals evolved was directly a result from the technology Jerry researched," Tucker said. They now have made about 100 images, which they plan to exhibit and possibly publish.

"They're still very good for identification, cause they're so clear. But in many ways, we like to use them for our art form, too," she said.

To digitize the flower, Lang and Tucker simply arrange the flower on the bed of the scanner and scan. With their advanced digital photographic technology, the image is unusually crisp compared to other digital images. Each flower takes about 30 to 40 megabytes of computer memory.

"The comment is usually, 'I don't see any pixelation,' "Tucker said, referring to the tiny colored dots that make up a printed image.

In taking the portraits of the flowers, they consider how the flower grows and its natural form and shape. "Plants sort of have a gesture about themselves," Tucker said, giving the trillium flower as an example. "The trillium is a native wildflower. It has a presence, but it also has a geometry, or an architecture that's unique about it."

Both Lang and Tucker agreed that a huge advantage to scanning the flower rather than taking photographs with film was the fact that an image on their computer appears immediately after scanning.

"We're having dialogue right away, and creative feedback right away," Tucker said. With the digital equipment, they have the liberty to quickly take multiple scans of the flower until they find one to satisfy them.

"There's a translation between taking a three-dimensional plant and transforming it to two dimensions, through digital technology," Lang said, adding they take into account color, lighting, scale, quality and other aspects that may be affected by the technology.

"The translation from subject to final print is sometimes different digitally than it is with film," he said.

Another advantage of the digital technology is that, from scan to final print, the process of taking a plant's portrait can be hours, even days shorter than the traditional silver halide film and darkroom process.

Lang's research and teaching with the Digital Photography Studio caught the attention of Nancy Brown, editor of Research/Penn State, a magazine detailing some of the research that occurs on-campus.

Using various pieces digital photographic equipment, Lang has illustrated and been the subject of various articles in the magazine.

"The two things we saw right away were the resolution, the fineness of the grain. It also reproduced finely right away in print," Brown said of the digital images. "You get extremely rich inking patterns."

When The Botanical Series debuted, Brown was impressed with the artistic quality of the portraits. "I think it's just magnificent. I had him make a print of it to hang on my office wall," she said. "I think it's some of the most beautiful photos of flowers I've ever seen."

A bouquet of flowers graced the cover of the Sept. 1999 issue of the magazine. "He arranges it in such away to make it artistic, rather than just scanned," Brown added.

Lang and Tucker plan to continue their Botanical Series as Tucker finds more and more plants to identify and photograph.

"It's causing other people to come up with collaborative responses," Tucker said, adding that the positive responses from people motivate her to continue taking the portraits.

"It is in essence teaching us along the way," Lang said. "As long as the interchange between what we're doing and what's happening continues, it continues to be an important endeavor of research."

Always the teacher, Tucker said she finds satisfaction in exposing the public to art in nature.

"That's the joy of waking people up to their world," she said. "And that's what's artists do."