Don Komarechka has long been one of my favorite G+ photographers because of his snowflake photos. Actually, ALL his macro photography is stunningly beautiful. Then came his ultraviolet photography, which is wildly different than anything I’d seen before, and beautiful in a very different way. And now this!
I’m sharing this image to one of my Science Collections though, not to a photography Collection, because of something else I admire so much about Don: his passion to truly understand what he photographs. I mean, he’s a a total geek after my own heart! 😁. If you actually read the commentary that he writes for every image he shares, you will know how detailed he gets with explaining the physics of it all. From how electricity flows through this flower in arcs to the levels of moisture condensation that snowflakes experience as they fall, you are not only awed by the beauty of each shot, but you come away from each smarter than you were before!
Originally shared by Don Komarechka
Eyes through Infinity
I’ve been meaning to try this for a long time, inspired by a comment my father made as a child, well before I had any interest in photography. This is an image of electric arcs jumping from a sunflower that has 30,000 volts of electricity flowing through it. Otherwise known as Kirlian Photography. Read on!
Kirlian photography has its origins as far back as 1889, but was popularized in the late 1970s when two Russian inventors, Semyon Kirlian and his wife Valentina, found a larger audience for their experiments photographing electrical coronal discharges originally published in 1958.
There have been a lot of claims in pseudoscience and parapsychology regarding Kirlian “auras” in the past decades, and I remember my father mentioning that this technique could create an aura from a leaf that would remain intact even after a portion of that leaf was cut. As an 11 year old boy, this was quite the spark for my imagination, and made me think that there is more to the world than meets the eye. It turns out, there is: residue and/or moisture from where the leaf was placed could still be reactive to the high voltage. If the glass plate where the leaf was placed was cleaned of these remnants the aura around the cut portion of the leaf would disappear. There was a scientific explanation for this, but I didn’t learn it until years later.
While some people feel that the stochastic electric ionization processes here are mystical and beyond the veil of our own existence, I remain a very skeptical person. As a skeptic, I’m thirsty for knowledge and am forever trying to answer questions for myself, not taking them at face value from others. One of the major factors that affects these Kirlian images is the inclusion of moisture. A fresh leaf or flower has a larger discharge than one with less moisture, and the energy from the electric discharge itself helps water molecules evaporate. I breathed moist breath on this flower before taking the picture and the discharged grew much more beautiful as a result.
This image is created using a special Kirlian aura generator (they call it a “camera” but it just creates the subject to photograph). Voltages can reach as high as 30,000 volts and frequencies up to 1kHz. Turning these knobs and dials is as fun as doing the same to an old vacuum-tube powered oscilloscope in my dad’s workshop, around the same time that I learned that this sort of imagery existed. An electrified probe is inserted into the base of the flower and a heavy plastic sheet is placed on top to press it against an electrified plate. A sheet of paper is placed between the flower and plate to avoid an instantaneous connection between cathode and anode.
Expect to see a handful of these from me through the year – I find them an interesting abstract realm of photography that is deeply woven into the physical mechanics of our universe. This one looks like an eye whose vision is comprised of a few dozen stars. Nothing mystical about it – just a fun way to use science to make art!
Other things you might be interested in:
2018 Macro Photography Workshop Schedule: http://www.donkom.ca/workshops/
2018 Ice Crystals Coin from the Royal Canadian Mint featuring my snowflakes: http://www.mint.ca/store/coins/coin-prod3040427
“The Snowflake” print, taking 2500 hours to create: http://skycrystals.ca/product/poster-proof/
Photo Geek Weekly, my new podcast: http://www.photogeekweekly.com/
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