2nd Place winner
Chemical Flower - A Colourful Bromeliad
DESCRIPTION
This is a photograph of natures art. A chemical splat leaves behind a stain. Chemical stains can be very beautiful if you know how to look! Sometimes they take on the appearance of solitary trees, sometimes they look like dense forests and other times they resemble plants or extravagant flowers. This formation brings to mind a colourful take on the Bromeliad native to Chile, Puya chilensis.
Given a chemical mixture, nature assembles it's molecular building blocks into sometimes fantastic formations, in a way so as to minimize the energy of the system which is called the Gibbs-free-energy. The fantastic pattern formations and colours that we can see depend on how the light interacts with the crystal as it passes through and this is all dependent on the properties of the molecules and how they are arranged in the crystal film.
AUTHOR
I am a passionate scientific photographer specializing in microscopy art. I continuously thrive to fuse art and science through advanced photographic techniques applied to microscopy. I am particularly passionate about imaging chemicals, pharmaceuticals and nutritional supplements. Because of my love for nature, especially the botanical aspect of our world, my imagery tends to take on botanical-like appearances. Over several years, I have self funded my home-based laboratory/studio where I carry out all my sample preparation and imaging. There, I experiment with the synthesis of chemicals in search of complex mixtures that produce exquisite patterns in their crystallographic structures. Every now and again I make a thrilling discovery! I find this kind of experimental photographic art and research extremely motivating and rewarding.
My aim is to encourage people to look at the finer details of our beautiful world and to cultivate an appreciation of its beauty. To generate curiosity in others through conversation by asking questions about what they think the art is when the they look at it. To me, scientific photographic art must not only be educationally informative, but it must be enlightening and it must be visually stunning to the extent that you would like to hang them on the walls of your home.
