2nd Place winner
Orion
DESCRIPTION
This body of work is part of a larger ongoing photographic project, begun while I was unable to leave my house with my camera due to Covid restrictions in the UK. My housebound goal was to find something interesting to photograph. At around the same time, I was given a microscope in exchange for some IT work. I bought a series of more and more capable microscopes, each more suited to photography than the last. These enabled me to discover a world of beautiful shapes and patterns in microscopic crystals photographed in polarised light. I immersed myself in trying countless combinations of different chemicals, acids, household cleaning agents, elemental chemicals, sugars, sweeteners and anything else I could find to try to crystallise.
The subjects are all entirely real and physical things. Their endless permutation of shapes and colours are created by the angle I have chosen for each crystal relative to the cross polarised light on the microscope. The addition of a wave plate causes a rainbow of colour to blossom. The scenes photographed are carefully discovered through a painstaking process of creating and then visually scanning through countless slides coated with various chemicals. Usually, the actual photographed scene is less than 0.5% of the area of the 75mm x 26mm slide which contains it.
AUTHOR
An amateur photographer for 25 years, I have always been drawn to photography of subjects that are difficult to find, challenging to capture, or require specialist equipment and techniques to make. My latest project, begun during the coronavirus pandemic involved me finding and acquiring a number of very old research microscopes, and learning how to take microscope photographs of crystals in polarised light.
The challenges are numerous, including discovering how to connect a modern digital camera to a 50+ year old microscope, as well as the difficulty of understanding polarisation and retardation of polarised light, and mixing, concocting and making countless microscope slides filled with various chemiclas.
The result however is a huge array of beautiful colourful scenes, all entirely real and natural subjects (when polarised and retarded light is allowed to pass through them).
This produced a successful joint exhibition titled Polychromo at Alveston Fine Art in London in March 2023, which included 16 of my photographs printed very large on Chromaluxe. It also won me the title of Fine Art Photographer of the Year - 2023 in the International Photography Awards. As a result, I am currently a finalist in Discovery of the Year, to be announced at the Lucie Awards at Carnegie Hall, NY, on 30 October 2023.
