Crystal Blossoms - a photo on Flickriver

Crystal Blossoms

This image represents a significant amount of discovery, experimenting, planning, and happy accidents. In the end, you’re looking at a collection of tiny Gooseneck Loosestrife flowers, plucked from their stem and placed inside a crystal geode, and illuminated with ultraviolet light.

The full details made it into my new book as the last example in the “MasterClass” section, and you can find that here: skycrystals.ca/product/pre-order-macro-photography-the-un... . The quick version still provides plenty of details, if you’d like to read on!

It turns out that Gooseneck Loosestrife is quite a fluorescent flower, giving off the look of floral fireworks. I often walk around my gardens at night with a UV flashlight to see what new flowers will glow / fluoresce that I haven’t explored, and to say these flower stalks got my attention is an understatement. After waking up the next morning, I knew what puzzle pieces to fit together.

The flowers were small enough to fit inside a “tunnel” geode I had bought a few years prior. I had always thought it would be a neat photographic subject, but never found the right theme. The same is true for the Laowa 24mm F/14 2x Macro Probe lens. Really neat concept, but not useful in every scenario. I started putting all these pieces together: the probe lens has a small enough barrel that it could actually fit inside the crystal tunnel.

With an intense and narrow UV LED flashlight, the Convoy C8, positioned on the other side of the geode filling the tunnel with UV radiation, I’d be able to make the flowers glow and appear as beacons inside the darkness. The flashlight is positioned on a Platypod Max with a gooseneck arm, which gives a lot more flexibility than a tabletop tripod when you need a precise trajectory of light to hit your subject. The idea was coming together, but there’s a curveball in play: the front of the 24mm probe lens contains a ring of LED lights. You wouldn’t think that should be a problem, but…

“White” LEDs don’t properly exist. In order to generate white light from an LED, we use an ultraviolet LED surrounded by various phosphors which fluoresce into the visible spectrum, a way of translating a narrow band of UV radiation into white visible light. A win for science! However, these phosphors are activated by UV light, even if it’s coming from an outside source. This means that the ring of LEDs, even when off, fluoresces orange. At first I was contemplating ways to cover these up, but no – the true gift here was to work with this “happy accident”. The orange glow you see in the front of the image is from the LED lights in the probe lens.

Focus stacked a few frames for a bit of added depth, but not much. This image works well when things fall out of focus. Plenty of fine tuning in post-production, but the “magic” is a natural in-camera fabric woven with equal parts art and science. Again, if you’re curious what steps go into constructing images like this from initial idea through completed results, check out the book in the above link!

Taken on: October 8, 2019

Tags:

crystal

flower

fluorescence

fluorescing

ultraviolet

UVIVF

geode

probe

laowa

glow

macro

science

gooseneck loosestrife

floral

growing

blossom

blooming

mineral

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Groups appears in: • The Barrie Area of Ontario • Ontario: Yours to Discover more » • Garden Flowers • PHOTOGRAPHERS OF CANADA • Tips from the Top Floor Podcast (tfttf) • Ontario Wild Flowers • UltraViolet • Ontario Native Vegetation • The World Up-Close (Nature Macro) • Science! • DIYPhotography • HIDDEN WORLD. • This Week in Photo • SLR Macro Photography • Simcoe Country, Ontario • CANADA >>> 1 Million Canadian Photos (56,062 Photos) • !!Perfect Composition!! • Photofocus • I am Canadian! • ***All beautiful shots and many more. • ***Flickr Global • Natur und Umwelt • The Nature Photography • Fluorescence • Not a Jack o'Lantern • Panasonic Lumix S1 & S1r • Panasonic Lumix S • World Photography Day Contest 2021 « less

Camera: Panasonic DC-S1R, 20 sec, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Panasonic DC-S1R
Exposure Time:	20
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Sharpness:	Hard
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 21.2 (Windows)
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