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 Spikes

I've never shot snowflakes before, and decided to give it a whack today, during our 8th snow in just over a month. I had decided to shoot them this morning around 8:30am when the flakes falling were still flakes.

By the time I got out later in the morning, the air had warmed up and the flakes were clumps of ice spikes instead. I snagged a few shots of the clumpy spiky stuff. I'll try to get something more snowflakey another time.

As an aside, pretty much everything I know about shooting snowflakes and other crystals (as well as the methods I use to shoot many other subjects in macro/micro), I learned by reading about Ken Liebbrecht's work at Caltech. So, thanks Ken, if you ever read this!

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Painterly, Intricate Lacework

I've had my first downtime in what seems like months, and had the opportunity to shoot at our friends' country house which previously yielded microphotos of Peacock Feathers and BeeBalm [Monarda] flowers. Luckily for me, the old farmhouse windows iced up dramatically in the recent bitterly cold wind and snow, and these intricate, beautiful patterns emerged overnight.

The size of the photos presented here don't do these pictures justice—they really should be turned into huge prints and hung as modern art (hint, hint). Maybe as an early Valentine's gift for your honey?

But to really show how much detail was contained in these iced windows, in an area about the size of a quarter, below is a cropped portion of the photo from above, followed by several more photos of the icy panes.

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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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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.

Icy Beer Frost

I had placed a beer in the freezer last night to cool it off quicker, then forgot about it. Took it out tonight, completely frozen. The bottle immediately began to frost over, so I shot it in macro.

In the photo above, you see the script "s" at the end of the Sam Adams' debossed in glass on the bottle, covered in condensation frost. Below is another shot of the side of the bottle. Below that is a 100% crop detail of the photo, so you can see the ice crystals that make up the frost.

To the naked eye, the frost appeared to be a uniform and smooth matte white coating. In macro/micro, the frost appears to be irregular and lumpy, though I had expected it to be a little more crystalline.

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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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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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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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Sunrise

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

Welcome to the first post in a series of macro photos, the Morning Macro.

I thought it would be fun to show these tiny worlds which are often easy to overlook. I'm fascinated with how different everything looks under such high magnification, so beautiful.

I will try to post these regularly, the name of the blog implies daily. We'll see about that ;-) In any case, thanks for visiting!

Above, you are seeing a macro photo of ice, up close and personal. Part of the charm of a good macro photo is an interesting method of lighting. This was inside a colored plastic cup and the flash came through the colored side to light the scene.

I love the soft focus and glowy lighting of this image.

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