Research by Zhou Xu, Alexander Gamble, Wuqi Amy Niu*, Morgan N. Smith*, Sloan Siegrist, Mark Tuominen and Maria M. Santore* was recently published in Langmuir. In this work the authors present a novel depletion-based fluorescence method to quantitatively image, on scale as fine as several nanometers, the shapes of objects adhered to a surface. Applied to bacteria, we quantify contact areas for cells adsorbed in different configurations and quantify the deformation of the cell envelope, related to signaling and biofilm formation.