P#22: A Beautiful Picture of the World Within a Plastic Ice Cube
John Siskin explains how a plastic ice cube and a bit of creativity created this beautiful shot
At first glance, you would never guess this photograph was of a plastic ice cube. How do you create art out of something so mundane? John Siskin explains the tools and techniques he used to get such an amazing shot.
Beauty in the Details
John Siskin: This is a picture of a plastic ice cube. A plastic ice cube can be used as a prop in doing things like food photography. It is taken through a microscope and I used polarizers to get the ice cube to diffract the light.
This is the kind of image that you can take in a studio, but the studio doesn't have to be any bigger than a closet. You just need to be able to control all the light in the area. This was a tungsten light shot because it makes it a lot easier to focus and you can actually see what you're doing. Microscopes are kind of dark. (click the image for a larger version)
The light comes through the polarizers, through the plastic ice cube, and you get this marvelous environment that you can examine with the microscope. I see people and they go out and they get telescopes. I've looked through some very nice telescopes. Mostly what I see through a telescope is blob of white.
Microscopes are relatively inexpensive and they're really easy to use with digital cameras. It's really a marvelous environment. You can take pictures of things that you would never have had the opportunity to see. It's just incredible.
Audri Lanford: We'll have to do a podcast on that sometime. That sounds very interesting. This is just a beautiful image. It is really amazing.
John Siskin: I can't tell you how happy I am with it.
Audri Lanford: I can imagine.
John Siskin: It's a journey of discovery when you work with a microscope. The rest of photography is not like that for me. I know what I'm looking for or I don't know what I'm looking for, but I see it. This is much more -- you feel like you're journeying through a strange optical land to come to someplace that you had never been before.
I know what a single scale of a butterfly wing looks like. I only know that because I took this journey with a butterfly wing.
To Sum Up
Some of the world's most beautiful pictures are of things you can't see with the naked eye. A microscope can open up a world of opportunities to photographers. That's exactly how John Siskin got this awe-inspiring shot of a plastic ice cube.
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