LOST IN PLAIN SIGHT ON THE FLOOR?
Can’t find a small pill you’ve dropped? Where’s the missing piece to the jigsaw puzzle? It can be very frustrating to know that some tiny thing you have dropped on the floor is there in plain sight, even in a brightly lit room, but you cannot find it. But all is not lost! That is, your small object is not going to be lost for long. You could of course sweep the floor and see what shows up in the dust pan, but there is an easier way.
In most cases like this the small object you are looking for happens to closely match the color and/or the pattern of the floor in the area where it lies. And an overhead light source, no matter how bright, makes it difficult because it casts no shadows from objects on the floor. Have you seen pictures of the craters on the moon? The ones that really stand out are those which are lit by sun light coming in at a slant.
So the secret to finding your little lost object is a bright beam of light coming in at nearly right angles. Use a flash light that makes a sharp narrow beam – one of the new LED types is good – and hold it down on the floor where you can slowly sweep the beam across its surface. Even the tiniest object will become immediately visible in the beam.
There is a disadvantage to this technique. It can show you what a bad housekeeper you are! Every tiny speck that is normally invisible on the floor now shows up, and it can make you either feel guilty, or head for the vacuum cleaner after picking up what you were looking for.
In the first picture there is a hairpin and a small jigsaw puzzle piece on the floor in a brightly-lit kitchen. See them? I can’t. But in the second picture they are caught in the beam of a small flashlight that’s at floor level. I wouldn’t have taken these pictures if the floor hadn’t been swept first. I wouldn’t want you to see what bad housekeepers we are!