Some Stank De-Stankin' Crystals

The kids and I cracked open one of their Christmas gifts early, a crystal-growing kit. The first thing we noticed was the strong odor that came from the bag of materials, the easily-recognized smell of sulphur. Upon opening it up and reading the instructions, we learned that the smell came from our crystal-growing seed material, potassium aluminum sulfate. And it was supplied in a variety of colors for our crystal-farming enjoyment. Naturally, we had to make the blue crystals first.

Potassium aluminum sulfate, or potassium alum, or potash alum, is the stuff used in deodorant, water treatment, aftershave and other fun industrial applications. What's funny is that it stinks so badly, but ultimately is about the cleaning and de-stinking of the world.

These photos are all observing an area about 3mm across

After our crystals were grown, about a week-and-a-half, I tweezed a few samples of the small crystals out of our experiment cup and shot them using the crossed-polar light technique. This is where I use a polarized filter on my lens that is at a 90° angle to the polarized filter on my flash. You may recall, this technique filters light to reveal some pretty psychedelic rainbow effects.

These photos were shot from above the crystals as they sat on a stretched piece of plastic wrap, suspended above the inside of a box backed with black construction paper; the flash was under the subject on one side, providing light from beneath the crystals. The use of transmissive light is one of the methods used by Ken Libbrecht to shoot snowflakes. As for why the black paper looks red in the photos, I can't account for that. Without more experimenting, I can't be sure if it looks like that because of the use of polarized filters, the plastic wrap, the dye used in the black paper (a reddish black dye vs a greenish black?), or a combination of these factors.

The color in these photos comes from several sources: The crystals were infused with some sort of blue/purple food coloring, and you can see some blobs of the coloring encased inside these crystals. Also, the cross-polarized light creates little flecks of rainbow colors inside these tiny prisms. Every mineral will bend cross-polarized light in a different way, and geologists, chemists, and other scientists use this technique to observe the presence and characteristics of different minerals and compounds in their study.

And yes, you can see the obvious dust on my sensor in these pics. Sorry about my dirty camera.

The girls and I are currently growing sugar crystals, so we can eat our experiment afterward. I'll be sure to shoot them, but if you're impatient and want to see sugar up close now, take a look at some of my past posts.

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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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