Crossed Polar Light Experiments 2

The photo above is another view of the frozen thin film of soapy water. I think it would be stunning output huge and mounted to a large wall.

In my last post, I explained how placing a polarizing filter on each side of a photo subject can produce fun and interesting light and color effects. I'll keep playing with it in future photos. In the meantime, here are a few more images from my experimentation.

You'll note that some of these don't contain the bright rainbows characteristic of crossed polar photography. I think this can be attributed to one of two reasons. Either the subject of the photo was not able to produce the colorful effects we saw in the previous photos, or my camera's polarizing filter was at something other than a 90° angle to the light source's polarizing filter.

I'm also posting more abstract and patterny images this round, as opposed to the more object-oriented images before.

Either way, I liked the photos in this batch too and believe they have their own artistic merit. The image below is a close up of an imperfection in a rocks glass on which I had attempted to dissolve a salt crystal in alcohol. I love the tensions and stresses captured inside the glass which are highlighted in this photo.

To me, the image below looks like a deep field space photo from the Hubble Telescope. In fact, it's an area of frozen soapy film covering only about 15mm. Amazing how we see the structures of nature repeated from the largest scale down to the smallest. I don't know what the glowy white orbs are in this photo. I think they mush have been bubbles which were outside my camera's depth of field starting to melt, or areas of larger ice crystal growth.

I like the serenity of the image below. It is another imperfection in the glass of the cup I was shooting. A much calmer imperfection than the other one, indeed.

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Crossed Polar Light Experiments 1

The photo above is soapy water sprayed as a thin film on plexiglass, frozen, and shot using cross-polarized light. Without crossed polars, this looks just black and grey.

While looking at some beautiful photomicography (pretty much the same as what I do, only using a microscope instead of foolishly hand-holding the camera like me), I stumbled across a way of using two polarized films to highlight details in a subject typically invisible to our eyes.

Your sunglasses may be polarized, and you would know because when you look at a shiny car in the sun, the reflections change noticeably. This is because the polarized film of your sunglass lens is only allowing light at one angle to pass through. To try out this concept, I simply used the two lenses of an old pair of shades.

If you take these two lenses out of the frame and hold them up against eachother, stacked, you will notice that things look just a bit darker through them. But, rotate one of them 90° from the other, and you will notice you see nothing through them. Like magic, they turn black against one another.

In photomicography using crossed polars, one places their light source directly beneath the subject, with a polarized film in between them. In this case, one of my sunglass lenses.

The other sunglass lens is situated between the subject and my camera lens (called the "objective" in fancy microscope-jockey terms), and I simply used tape to hold it in place over the front of my lens. It is important when shooting this way, to hold the camera and position the lens so that the two polarized films (sunglass lenses) are at 90° angles to eachother. They should "black out" eachother, but you can still see the subject between them.

If your subject is plastic, or a crystal structure, you should see rainbow patterns inside them as you dial in the correct angle of the lens/polarizer relative to the light/polarizer. And this is how it's done. I want to reiterate that all these photos were made using white light, no colored lights or fancy computer tricks involved.

Scientists shoot minerals and other substances using this technique (though far more complex than I have explained here) and are able to identify materials by the way they scatter light between the two polarizing films. I am just using it to make pretty pictures.

Above is another view of the frozen soapy water. I think it was starting to melt at this point. The three last images below are different views of bubble wrap using cross polarized light.

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Ice Fishies

Just a quick post today. This is one of my favorite ice bubble photos that I've taken. I was lucky to have the opportunity to see it printed huge for an installation I did at the offices of New York design boutique, String Theory. It looks great huge (60" x 90") as well as on screen!

To me, this looks like a photo of fish swimming up a stream.

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Popcorn!

The bizarre and tiny world of popcorn. As I thought would be the case, popcorn's structure is cellular/bubbly, like foam. I thought it best to shoot macro/micro photos of popcorn before buttering.

The giant cave you see above is the edge of a popcorn shell inside a popped piece of corn. Don't look too closely, you might get it stuck in your tooth. Below are a few more shots of the strange textural landscape of a piece of popcorn.

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Christmas Fish Eyes

A quick closeup of one of our Christmas ornaments. I took this while packing them away earlier this month. At normal size, it's a seafoam green sparkly christmas ball. I wanted to see what the sparkle was made of, and as you can see here, millions of tiny clear balls are adhered to the ornament. They look like bubbles or fish eyes, at this level of magnification.

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A Green Spongy Foam Forest

While this looks like an overgrown lichen or bizarre moss, it is actually squishy green packing foam. I yanked a piece from one of the boxes while packing away Christmas ornaments.

I was most intrigued by the prismatic rainbows sparkling in the thinnest membranes of the foam. We've looked at foam before here, and it too was full of rainbows.

I like how this one looks like an alien forest, and am happy to add it to my collection of alien forests,  farms, and seed pods.

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Art Installation at String Theory

Here are a few photos of the large (60"x90") pieces I've installed in the offices of New York design boutique, String Theory. Studio owner, John, chose two of my ice bubble images, one of which has been published here at Morning Macro, to hang on his walls.

Thanks to John Vondracek for the photos, he is the owner of these images and I am stealing them for my use. You, however, may not also steal them for your use.

More Bubbles in Streaming Tap Water

I have consistently received such a positive, surprised, and delighted response from my previous tap water photo, that I decided to shoot a few more for kicks. So here you go, tap water fans. Drink up.

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100th Post! Hoboken Studio Tour, a Slideshow, and Bubbles?

So here we are at my 100th photo post at Morning Macro.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all three of my fans—and Mom—for visiting my photo posts so consistently. I have really enjoyed building this site, and if I could make a career of shooting tiny stuff right about now, I absolutely would.

Which brings up my next bit of news! I will be exhibiting in the Hoboken Studio Tour on Sunday, October 18, from noon to 6pm. I will show some large prints of macro photos (approx 30x45"), and I will setup two macro-lens cameras for visitors to try hands-on.

Additionally, I encourage anyone stopping by to bring an tiny intriguing item the size of a nickel or smaller. I will shoot a macro/micro photo of it on the spot and email the photo to its owner free of charge!

I will have more details about my (borrowed) studio location soon. So, make the trip to Hoboken later this month, swing by and say hi!

Last time I mentioned my impending 100th post, I said I was going to switch up the goal of the site. I wanted to look forward and bring Morning Macro to more people in more ways. Since then, we've seen a first attempt at what can be done with macro video, and I will be exhibiting at the upcoming event mentioned above. Plus, the Tiny Lab I'll setup for the Hoboken Studio Tour will bring the macro and micro world to more people. So, here's another cool thing...

I've setup a slideshow of all the Morning Macro photos, and a few that have never been posted (easter eggs!). I will try to keep this up to date, but that may not always happen. For instance, today's new post below is not in the slideshow. Oops! Also, the photos are not in the order that they had been posted to the site. So go take a look! What are you waiting for?

Now, I again ask that my three loyal fans—and Mom—send my Morning Macro site around to anyone you know who would appreciate it. And keep sending your suggestions for something tiny you'd like to see big!

Now, on to some celebratory bubbles! These bubbles below were roughly the size of this "o". I used a bit of a frozen raspberry, and squirted some cleaning solution from a spray bottle on it. The resulting shimmery bubbles against the deep raspberry color were really beautiful to me.

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Squishy Foam!

This is foam, close-up; the soft stuff used to protect fragile things. I use this as padding for one of my lenses in a small hard case. It looks grey when viewed with your eyes. At this level of magnification, we see the beautiful little prismatic bubbles that make up the structure of the foam. Cool!

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Soda Bubbles, and How They Attach to the Glass

I was asked why the water bubbles in my previous post aren't flat on one side where they are attached to the side of the glass.

The bubbles you see above were photographed in a glass of Sprite; sugary carbonated beverage. I shot a bunch of photos of these bubbles, which were larger than the ones available in a glass of water. Only one-ish of the photos was focused in a way that shows the pad of bubble attached to the side of the glass. I'm guessing that it's a hard thing to get spot on focus with since I've seen it so rarely.

Clearly, you can see that these bubbles are not merely half spheres hanging out in there. Rather, they are complete spheres with a little bit attached to the glass, holding it in place. And the attachment is not simply flat, but kind of veiny and weird. Perhaps that structure is what creates a sort of suction that holds the bubble in place.

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Bubbles in Water

These teensy tiny bubbles were stuck to the side of my glass of water. Not a carbonated beverage, which tends to have larger bubbles, these are the result of water sloshing around while filling the glass.

They're very small, ranging from about a half to a whole millimeter each. I am particularly pleased with how silvery and metallic they look, refracting everything through them they look like highly reflective orbs. If I had been setting up the shot more carefully (this was just a drive by shooting), I would have placed something with an interesting pattern behind them for a really cool effect. I'll do that in a future photo and post the result.

Just a program note, I will be heading off to Project M Sunday, so I may or may not be posting for the next two weeks. Depends on my availability and connectivity, of course. Should be a great experience.

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Solid Gold Ice, Ice, Baby

This image of ice bubbles is very fluid, very painterly. It's one of my very early ones.

I've left you people -- all 3 of my readers and one follower (yay! thanks Jaime) -- without an ice photo for a while now. I couldn't help myself. So here you go. Back to bugs, spices, and other odds 'n' ends next post.

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Ice Flows, or Maybe Not

Time for another ice photo. I know Sarah (my wife) is tired of these, but it's because she's been seeing them for years. So I discount her opinion on the ice photos as biased.

I was intrigued by the way this one turned out, as it looks like bubbles being poured from a very transparent pitcher. In fact, these bubbles were trapped in the ice in that formation making them appear to be in motion. This is one of the reasons I love shooting the ice, these photos can reveal something sculptural and familiar (christmas ornaments, chandeliers, a sunrise, insect eggs, etc.) among the abstract patterns and random currents of the freezing ice.

I'll post one that looks like fish swimming upstream sometime soon, for all you ice fans out there.

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Streaming tap water, captured in high-speed

Another type of photography that fascinates me (there are so many!) is high-speed photography. In this case, I've shot a macro semi-high-speed photo of water streaming out of the tap.

What I found with this shot was how the stream of water was completely filled with bubbles. And it seems like such a strange idea that water moving so fast from the tap could be so filled with bubbles. And they look so big too! So diamond-like and sparkly.

If I didn't know what this was, I would never have guessed that it's simply tap water.

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More Ice Bubble Ornaments

This is one of the earlier ice photos that really inspired me to explore tiny things more and in greater detail. I found these bubbles and reflections so abstract and beautiful, I couldn't stop looking through what I'd captured.

I love the geometric light reflections in this shot, and the ridiculously ornamental bubbles (only a millimeter or less each) were fascinating in all their bizarre organic shapes.

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Ornaments

More bubbles in ice that look like Christmas ornaments; a seasonal photo for the Morning Macro photo blog.

I also like the explosive look of this one, the bubbles look like they've been ejected from the right of the frame, when in reality, they are literally frozen there. Fascinating that the ice froze over a period of time, not in an instant, and the result is still so active and expressive.

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Feather

Copyright ©2009 Adam Saynuk. All rights reserved. This image may not be duplicated, downloaded, reproduced, altered, or printed without permission.

Another example of the beautiful patterns made by bubbles in ice. This image is so feathery, the bubble trails look almost soft. I'm always amazed at what I get to see through the lens when shooting macro.

The quality of light is important in these photos, as well as any photo. In this case, I was lucky that my flash setup wasn't doing what I needed it to, and I had to use the ambient available light, a mix of daylight and indoor incandescent. It was my good fortune that this light worked well to enhance the softness of the image.

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Chandelier

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Another ice photo. I admit, I love them.

They're beautiful and alien. This photo was taken at a point when these bubbles in the ice were just being released from captivity into the water. So they are emerging from the edge of the ice where the air was contained in long, tube-like snakey structures.

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Ice Creatures

Copyright ©2009 Adam Saynuk. All rights reserved. This image may not be duplicated, downloaded, reproduced, altered, or printed without permission.

Another photo of ice filled with bubbles. The shapes these little pockets of air make inside the ice are incredible. You will see in some other ice photos that I've not yet posted, the bubbles--molded by pressure and time through the freezing process--make fantastic shapes. They often look like Christmas ornaments, bulbous, snaking, and silvery.

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