1st Place winner
Sparks And Stripes
DESCRIPTION
The image is of the biological stain Acid Fuchsin, Picric Acid and Alanine Crystals, shot at x200 using polarised light.I experiment with different crystals. They have many different formations. Alanine makes these wonderful bright needles which I hoped would combine well with the red/pink Acid Fuschin and normally white picric acid.
Each image I create typically takes about 30 - 40 hours of work to create from creating the slide, looking for good compositions, shooting (I take each shot), focus staking, and stitching the resulting images and editing (normal clean up, some minor colour level tweeks - normally attempting to gain the colour as I saw it which was the case in this work).
Sparks and Stripes is composition of 500 images using focus stacking and stitching. This x200 lens has a very narrow depth of focus and field of view and only by such composition can one create good compositions.
The image's master is 11200 x 6880 at 300 dpi.
This could be considered to fit into several of your categories but I present it as abstract art.
AUTHOR
I'm a Cambridge based secondary (high school) teacher and photographer.I explore texture, colour, perspective, light, shade and translucency using mineral, vegetable and animal matter prepared with skill for the microscope and camera.
Most of my pieces first involve preparation of a slide, which can take can take several days of technical work involving staining and lab equipment. Microscopes have a very limited focus depth and small field of view. I create compositions by taking hundreds or thousands of photographs together with focus stacking and stitching, both algorithmic and manual.
I use a variety of lighting techniques, quite often utilising polarised light.
There are wonderful visions of abstract beauty hidden from view and my goal is to compose these and bring them to colourful light.
