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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Along the Edges

I have several photos of the edges of things from some recent shoots. Above is the edge of a piece of a mirror; the glass is about 2 or 3mm thick. And though the sharp edges of glass may look straight, they are often full of nicks and dings and chipped surfaces.

The next photo is the edge of an aerogel. This very fragile material is one of the worlds best insulators (it's about 97% air) and is also the least dense substance on earth. It's created in laboratories and used by NASA for insulating spacecraft, among other more earth-based uses.

This sample of aerogel was contributed kindly by a fan of Morning Macro. Thank you, Matt!

See if you can guess from the next two photos what they are before reading further.

The two photos above are different edges on a typical disposable plastic tape dispenser. The first is the cutting edge for the tape, and the second is an edge of the curved body of the dispenser, with a printed insert inside.

The last two photos that follow are more from the crossed polars shoots. These are the cut edges of bubble wrap, and you can see the wall thickness of the "bubbles" clearly in these shots. Remember, the colors in these photos were present in the actual subjects, and were the fascinating result of using two polarized films in opposing alignment, not because it was lit with colored lights. Only white light was used in the capture of these photos.

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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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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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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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Alien Lifeforms

The centers of poinsettia blooms (they're actually just awesomely-colored leaves as my horticulturist/landscape architect uncle Pete has informed me) contain some alien-looking parts. Like alien eggs ready to hatch, and alien baby tentacles reaching out innocently for your delicious brains. I've added a non-macro photo of these center bits below where they are nestled inside the colorful leaves of the plant, so you can understand the true size of the parts we are looking at here.

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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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Dragonfly Eyes

It was really strange, and kind of sad. In fact I'm still thinking about it days later.

We recently vacationed at Peninsula Lake, in the Muskoka region of Ontario. The vacation was not sad at all, it was relaxing and beautiful. I'll post more nature pictures from there in the coming days.

But the experience we had with this dragonfly was just bizarre. My daughter and niece found this kind-of-busted dragonfly on the dock, and were able to pick him up easily. So I decided to shoot him for this site. He would try to fly now and then but was unable to coordinate his wings well enough to even get of the ground. his head lolled about like a senior with Parkinsons disease. He would sit still with us touching and moving him to a better position. He never cleaned the sand off his eyes, as you can see above.

I think this little guy must have been snatched by a bird earlier in the day or within the last several days, and that perhaps damaged his neck/spine. Something had happened to him, and he'd lived life through to adulthood, so it must have been a recent trauma. But now, he was powerless to fly, defend, and I'm sure, hunt. So we were shooting his portrait in perhaps his last evening of life.

Perhaps I'm overthinking it... I don't expect dragonflies have feelings or that this one can recognize the futility of his situation. I don't even know if he could feel pain. And there's no dragonfly hospital to accept this victim. I don't know why, but the helplessness of this dragonfly's situation has stuck with me, and I feel sad because my own projected feelings for him are those of cold, fear, and loneliness.

So, enjoy these closeups of our dragonfly friend. His eyes are ridiculous/amazing, actually. So many hexagons. And his little whiskery face almost looks like that of a small dog or cat. Below, you can see his stained-glass wings, their cellophane-like layers creating a slight rainbow effect.

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