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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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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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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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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Bee Balm

The photo above was clearly the winning picture today at the Hoboken Artists Studio Tour, as far as crowd reaction goes. This photo of the stalk under the petals of a Monarda bloom was the most well received image I showed today. Last year's crowd favorite (judged by observation) was the tap water, which you can see here.

If you missed it, by the way, I was mentioned in two different articles about the Studio Tour. One was an artist profile at the Jersey Journal (Adam Saynuk, Micro Photography) and the other was at the Hoboken Reporter (Showcasing Art in the Mile Square).

The photo that drew the second place (in terms of gasps and "no ways!") was the microphoto image of bread, as you can see below. Bread, it appears, is nothing more than cavernous bubbles encased in clear starchy, gluteny wisps.

I would say the third most liked (or "wowed") photo was the next photo down of mold on a chocolate cake. This field of flowers seemed to fascinate everyone for the same reason many of the other images did, because it's so unexpected.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see my work today!

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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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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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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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Stay Sharp, Pencil Pusher

These are closeups of a metal manual prism pencil sharpener. It's about an inch long. The photo above is a portion of the hole where the pencil goes in.

Below is a portion of the brand debossed into the metal body of the sharpener. I like the graphic look of the letters. Note how the very limited depth of field at this level of magnification crosses from the highest point inside the "g" topographically, to the lowest part of the "r" canyon floor. In other words, I can only keep details sharp if they are within about 1/2 a millimeter depth from the lens. This is one of the biggest challenges of shooting tiny things like this on such a micro scale.

The photo below is the sharpener blade. You can see microscopic bits of pencil lead and wax shavings leftover from a previous meal.

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Chocolate Cake Mold

Mold started to grow exceptionally fast on a leftover chocolate cake hanging around the kitchen. I think the mold must have grown so quickly because it was a very very good chocolate cake, and not full of preservatives. Note the cool, gnarly little flower-like dealies at the ends of the mold spores.

The total area for the entire patch of mold was smaller than a dime, and it just appears to be a velvety, short, soft whitish-green fuzz. the portion I have shown here is a little smaller than a grain of rice.

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