Giant Blocks of Sugar Rocks

This is a sugar crystal. A big one. This sucker was about 4 or 5cm across. I like the misty blue effect along the top of the crystal in the photo above. This is actually a simple light smear due to camera shake.

The colors in these photos are from Legos that surrounded the sugar crystals when I was shooting. Crystals pickup the reflected tones, shadows and light that surround them. I was intrigued by the textures on/in the crystals that looked like rain on a window.

I love the geometric-ness of many of the crystals we grew. I made them with the kids by making a super-saturated solution of sugar and water, then we placed sticks in it and waited, and waited... and waited.

It took about three weeks for us to get pretty good sticks encrusted with big, blocky crystals. I was surprised it took so long, all the online tutorials for growing great sugar crystals made it sound like it was a much faster process. We also saw a lot of extra crystal growth on the bottom of the cups. I think this happened because we must have had a little un-dissolved sugar in the solution.

Below are the crystal-encrusted sticks we grew, and from which these photos have come.

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Those Busy Busy Bees

Here we have two products of our friendly bee architects.

The photos of hexagonal structures, obviously, are part of a honeycomb which we found on the beach in Akumal, Mexico. Each cell of this honeycomb is about 5mm wide, and the entire sample piece is actually quite small and fragile. I don't know what kind of bee made this and we never did see the original owner bees when we found it abandoned.

You can see that the honeycomb is composed of tiny, woody, pulpy strands and chunks "glued" together with what I assume is bee spit. What amazes me, even after inspecting it closely, is how precisely the walls of the structure are positioned to create the regular, repeating hexagonal pattern. These guys don't work with rulers and compasses, so I have no idea how they get it so right. Amazing!

(NOTE: the squiggly hair-looking things are most likely just some dust that got stuck to the honeycomb sample sometime during transport home)

The next few photos are close-ups of another piece of bee ingenuity... a wasp nest. The sample was kindly contributed by a friend who found it in his attic while doing some home renovations. At normal size, it looked something like this.

When we get close, however, the papery layers reveal a fragile mesh of undulating, interconnected woody strands reminiscent of a mat of hair (though far smaller). It looks like some kind of deconstructed curtain. These photos capture an area between 5mm wide and about 10mm wide. I can't imagine the effort needed to weave just the parts captured in these photos, much less the many dozens of layers like it that are needed to form a nest about the size of a soccer ball.

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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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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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Butterfly Wings

Butterfly wings are clear! Under the layers of scales on each side of the wing is a clear membrane, like other insects' wings. In the photo below, one can clearly see the wing scales on the other side of the wing through this clear membrane.

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Ever Wonder What Pollen Looks Like?

Well, Here you go.

The pictures in this post successively magnify the stamen of a flower and then we zoom into the pollen it's holding. I think they ultimately look like Spanish yellow rice.

As I understand it, pollen comes in all shapes and sizes, these just being one variety which is fairly large. I estimate these particular pollen grains at about .2 mm, or about 150-200 micrometers each.

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Peacock Feathers

We recently stayed at our friends' beautiful country house and I had a little time to shoot around the property, finding some neat little things I'll post here in the coming days.

One part-time resident of the farmhouse is a peacock who wanders on and off the yard occasionally, eating Scott's lavender. The peacock has left many of his stunning feathers around the place, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to shoot them and see what makes them shine like they do.

The photo above is of an area about an inch wide. I then zoomed in for the photo below, which is an area about 5mm wide. The individual strands of feather (called barbs) appear to be metallic themselves, and made of little sections.

What follows are a few more microphotos of the different parts of the peacock feather. Some look like christmas garland or pine tree branches to me; more amazing evidence of nature's incredible symmetry and cohesiveness, or its lack of imagination. Depends on your viewpoint.

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A Magnolia Leaf

Mimi picked up a magnolia leaf and wanted me to shoot it. This is the result.

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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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Holographic Paper

The kids have some holographic craft paper. I actually think it's aluminum or mylar, not paper.

Here are some microphotos of it, whatever it's made of. Its beautiful, prismatic shine is lots of fun for the girls, and also still mesmerizing to me.

I found it interesting to see that the aluminum/mylar/paper is embedded with millions of microscopic reflective "pixels" that split light into colors from the spectrum. Totally cool. I'm also intrigued how much these photos look like photos of an LCD display.

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Charcoal Filter Charcoal

Our drip coffee maker has a little water filter inside which needs to be changed occasionally. We changed it for the first time in about 6 years this past weekend. I had bought the wrong filter though (the Keurig one looked like it would fit our Cuisinart!!!!) and the new filter needed to be, uh, drained of some of its charcoal in order to fit.

So, here's how these things work: Water goes through meshy fabric, water goes through charcoal, water comes out pure and not full of chlorine and minerals.

I snipped open the old filter too, so we could see what used filter charcoal looks like. These photos are of charcoal grains about the size of sand grains, maybe a little bigger. In these examples, the new charcoal (photos 1 and 2 where the grains are dry) looks exactly the same as the old charcoal (photo 3 where the charcoal is wet) which had been in service for 6 years. I had thought maybe there would be some discernible difference in the look of the charcoals, but I can't see any.

At the bottom of this post is a closeup of the fabric of the container that makes up this charcoal filter. Looks like a synthetic fiber to me, but I don't know for sure. You can see some crud has become trapped in the fibers. So, REMINDER, change your cruddy old water filters. They're gross!

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LED Christmas Lights

Here are the best microphotos I can get right now of the light-emitting diode (LED) inside an energy-efficient LED Christmas light. You can see that the electronics inside are different than the glowing tungsten filament in a standard incandescent mini Christmas light, which we've looked at before.

LEDs work differently than incandescent lights, use far less energy, and generate far less heat. To get these photos, I actually had to shoot many frames because of the way LEDs work. They strobe very fast, blinking on and off many times a second. This aspect of their function meant that about half the photos I took of the diode came out completely black.

I also found it interesting that the blue diode appeared to have two attaching wires at the top as opposed to the single lead on the orange diode above. While I don't know why they are different in this way, I do know that there are differences in the ways different colored diodes function. Getting the right light frequency is apparently part art and part science.

Another LED tidbit is that white LED lights are actually not white. Rather, they are made from one of the other LED colors tuned to a very desaturated color within its frequency.

I'm gonna say I'm about 98% right on that bit of cocktail party knowledge. It's knowledge for a geek cocktail party, but a cocktail party nonetheless.

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