The following are a series of images showing cross-polarisation. The subject uses a transparent plastic object, typically an ornament or packaging material. It is then lit from behind using a laptop LCD screen as a source of polarised light and then the picture is taken with a polarising filter fitted on the front of the lens.
Some (usually cheap) plastics have the property of changing the polarisation of the light passing through them, and often this is frequency dependent so that different colours experience different polarisation shifts. Often this is related to stresses in the material during manufacture. The effect is a range of distorted colours and strange artificial images. The effect seems to work best with cheap plastics such as bubble-wrap.
The six images in this gallery are:
- a toy fish inside of a plastic cube
- a an abstract macro image from a plastic horse ornament
- bubbles on the inside of a plastic cup
- a pair of glasses
- some clear plastic spheres from a craft shop
- a clear plastic dome placed on top of a photograph shown on the laptop
The images aren’t processed in photoshop – the colours are what comes out of the camera with the polarising filters…
Three fish photographs: graffiti, food dish at the Boqueria and Frank Gehry’s fish sculpture on the sea-front in Barcelona.
[Edit] Updated to include the fourth fish photograph – a macro image of a wax candle, lit from underneath by placing it on a (cold) lamp.
Two tourist photographs.
The first is a cross polarised image of a cheap souvenir of the Sagrada Famila. The ornament is a tiny perspex block which has been laser etched to contain a 3D model of the cathedral (I wonder if the Pope took one of these back when he visited last week?). The block was placed in front of a laptop screen, showing a plain white window, and then it was photographed using a polarising filter on the camera’s lens. The resulting colours are due to different frequencies of light undergoing polarisation shifts in the perspex, largely due to mechanical stresses in the material.
The second photograph is an image of tourists on the Monjuic. There seem to be onliy two kinds of visitors to the hillside this morning. One set arrive in large shiny buses and won’t move more than 10m from the stop. The other set arrived on mass as an organised walk with likely more than a thousand people and organised stops for food – the Caminada a Montjuïc.
A simple silhouette of a statue from the end of the Paral.lel, Barcelona. I got some odd looks taking this, as I had to stand on a bench in the dark at a very odd angle to get the framing against the Museu Maritim. It was also quite hard to get a sharp image as there wasn’t enough light to get a fast shutter speed…
Metal cast image of Ganesha, lit front and back by candlelight.