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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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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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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Play That Fungi Music, White Boy

The pod above is about the same thickness of the pin point I posted several weeks back. And look at all that detail around its little edge! Pretty cool.

Below is a picture of a mushroom that I flubbed by over-exposing it, but I like the look after dialing in some contrast, so, whatever.

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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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Yeast, Aluminum Packaging, Kitchen Table

The objects above are not teeth. They are dry baking yeast nubs, the kind that come in a little foil package. I didn't know what to expect when I shot them, and this is what I got! Weird world.

Below is a shot of the edge of the foil packet the yeast came in. Further below is a slightly wider shot of the same section of the yeast package.

Here we have a piece of our kitchen table, it's formica or something. If you look very close, there appear to be tiny threads within the white textured resin of this tabletop. I suppose this might be made in a process similar to fiberglass, whereby a fiber and resin mixture is molded and dried.

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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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Bell Pepper Seeds

Yet another set of photos that turned out better than I thought they would. I was originally just shooting the cut open pepper. And just out of curiosity, I got my macro lens out and started shooting the seeds. They turned out to be beautiful and strange and wonderfully textured.

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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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Christmas Light Filaments

These are the glowing hot filaments inside of an incandescent mini Christmas light. These are typically made of tungsten. I haven't figured out how to get a good shot of one of our LED Christmas lights yet.

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PureVia, Purple Sugar, and Demerara Sugar

We've already seen several sugar substitutes up close. Above is PureVia, a newer one derived from the zero-calorie sweetener rebaudioside A (rebiana). More lumpy crystals that look white at normal size.

Below is a photo of good ol' regular sugar crystals-- purple ones! These are for cookie and cake decorating. The girls used bales of this stuff for decorating our holiday treats.

Further down is a shot of demerera sugar. In this photo, the sugar crystals look like the giant stones of a sunken Atlantis roadway. I am surprised how un-sugar-like they look, rounded corners and all. I wonder if it is due to the natural impurities present in this type of unprocessed sugar.

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