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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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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Christmas Fish Eyes

A quick closeup of one of our Christmas ornaments. I took this while packing them away earlier this month. At normal size, it's a seafoam green sparkly christmas ball. I wanted to see what the sparkle was made of, and as you can see here, millions of tiny clear balls are adhered to the ornament. They look like bubbles or fish eyes, at this level of magnification.

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Soda Bubbles, and How They Attach to the Glass

I was asked why the water bubbles in my previous post aren't flat on one side where they are attached to the side of the glass.

The bubbles you see above were photographed in a glass of Sprite; sugary carbonated beverage. I shot a bunch of photos of these bubbles, which were larger than the ones available in a glass of water. Only one-ish of the photos was focused in a way that shows the pad of bubble attached to the side of the glass. I'm guessing that it's a hard thing to get spot on focus with since I've seen it so rarely.

Clearly, you can see that these bubbles are not merely half spheres hanging out in there. Rather, they are complete spheres with a little bit attached to the glass, holding it in place. And the attachment is not simply flat, but kind of veiny and weird. Perhaps that structure is what creates a sort of suction that holds the bubble in place.

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Bubbles in Water

These teensy tiny bubbles were stuck to the side of my glass of water. Not a carbonated beverage, which tends to have larger bubbles, these are the result of water sloshing around while filling the glass.

They're very small, ranging from about a half to a whole millimeter each. I am particularly pleased with how silvery and metallic they look, refracting everything through them they look like highly reflective orbs. If I had been setting up the shot more carefully (this was just a drive by shooting), I would have placed something with an interesting pattern behind them for a really cool effect. I'll do that in a future photo and post the result.

Just a program note, I will be heading off to Project M Sunday, so I may or may not be posting for the next two weeks. Depends on my availability and connectivity, of course. Should be a great experience.

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