Microscope Photography

My lifelong fascination with lenses began with the humble magnifying glass. At first, the kind of cheap plastic ones which came as a free gift in cereal packets. Later on, a really powerful, thick glass magnifier gifted by my Grandfather. It was a treasured tool in my armoury to explore the world of the small. I started off with insects, leaves and bits from the garden, being mightily impressed with the intricate small details I observed, which my normal eyes could not discern. I then moved to on to anything small enough to put on the slide from around the house.

My First Microscope

It was my Grandfather also, who gifted a small but perfectly formed microscope in a wooden box for my seventh Birthday. It had a mirror to reflect light into the tube and I was amazed when I first saw the hairs on a fly's leg and the fluffy structure of seemingly smooth cotton thread. It was at this point I was hooked. I even tinkered with the idea of becoming a scientist at one point.

• Salt Crystals self forming give the impression of a modern city centre layout

Science Equipment

As an adult I invested in some real microscopes with 800 /1200 magnification and when digital became reasonably priced I obtained a microscope camera. At first just a 640x480 pixelated cheap one, but later a much more sophisticated, 2mb HD camera which meant I could start recording video in earnest. I had already learned how to grow all manner of tiny creatures in test tubes and to successfully culture Paramecium from dried grass. I was also fascinated with my other childhood hobby, crystal growing and began to grow crystals under the eye of the micro lens.

• This intriguing view of salt crystals on the slide appears like an isolated mountain village of the kind you might find on the way to Everest

Installation at the V&A

As an artist / installation designer I came up with the idea for a re-enactment of evolution under the microscope along with my graphics partners from Shroomstudio and Audio Collaborator Experimenter En Couleur. We were commissioned by the V&A to produce an installation for the Gargantuan space of the Raphael room (where Elton John had his Birthday party !) and we set up a tryptic of Giant projection screens. It was in celebration of the opening of the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition and I wanted to create something that he would have been impressed by.

• Very long simple worm type creature caught still looking very similar to a highway intersection junction which it's fluid circular slip roads

Performance Art

So we performed a 45 minute piece called Evolution Synthetica whereby we re-enacted the processes of evolution from the simplest swirling gases, through crystaline growth, single celled protozoa and finally complex life. We managed to break the golden V&A rule of no insects allowed in the building. We had a box of fruit flies who were the stars of the show and we had to handpick no more than 15 specimens, leaving the rest of the cast of thousands disappointed in the dressing room (the van we'd hired for the day.)

• Sugar crystals in isolation

Pecha Kucha - (Chit Chat)

I was later invited to take part in a Pecha Kucha at the Oxo Tower in London as part of the OneDotZero Festival programmes, on the theme of architecture & cities. With this in mind I assembled a series of slides for my talk with a lean towards structures in the macro environment and of those particularly reminding me of elements of natural landscapes & human habitation.

• Sugar crystals in isolation appearing as if a cross-section of a primitive segmented creature

Processing Images

Processing the images allowed me to bring out detail in the images and labelling them helped the audience understand what each image was. The point I wanted to make in relation to cities is that under the microscope, the patterns we see are reflective of the large scale structures we see around us, that we live in and that we also build, perhaps revealing tantalising clues about the rules of nature which we are not yet fully aware of. Some of which we do know are related to fractal geometry but others relating to efficiency and use of space.

• Is this the edge of the Arctic Circle where glaciers calve giant icebergs the size of city blocks into the ocean ?

• Bacteria amass in large groups as the plate begins to dry out under the light, or is this a satellite view of a small town near to outlying villages.

Technical

these images are taken with a 2mb microscope USB camera which is in effect a 10x magnifying eyepiece replacement. The camera connects directly to opencapture allowing photograph and video recording. The video stills are a result of choosing mp4 compression. As most of the plate is still the encoding can produce high quality / high frame rate video direct to drive.

• Paramecium, single celled organisms feasting on bacterial mass as if a shoal of Tuna upon a bait ball

Processing

Artificial colour processing using Photoshop brings out detail in the same way nucleic dyes pick out detail in traditional microscope slide preparation. The original slides can often look dull as colour is not necessarily preserved at the microscopic scale to produce beautiful or even interesting results. SImple colour processing allows for a more artistic interpretation of the imagery while retaining fine detail for clarity

• Paramecium in close up jostling & rushing past each other reminding me of busy city workers navigating the metro system gates at rush hour

all images copyright Christos Hatjoullis (Outerground)