“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination . . .”
Have I mentioned I’m an engineer, with a brain that always felt more suited for science than art? Technical problems fascinate me, and a big part of photography is the technical.
One of my goals for this year is to do photography of phosphorescent mushrooms and lichens. To help achieve that goal I modified a flash unit to shoot in narrow band ultraviolet. What exactly does that mean?
Well let me show you…
People think of ultraviolet as that classic purple blacklight color, but that’s actually not it. That’s a manufacturing defect. A side effect.
It’s expensive, way more expensive, but if you’re willing to pay up it’s possible to eliminate it. But give a crafty girl some industrial scraps, a glass cutter and some adhesive and there’s nothing that can stop her.
The nice thing about this project is that it’s just a standard flash, like all my other flashes. It can tie into my whole studio setup. I can carefully set up the lights however I want, and then just make the neon elements appear lit by their own magical energy. All without sitting under a UV lamp for a whole session.
The effect is magical in real life. These photos are all almost unedited. Just some tweaks to contrast and saturation, but honestly less than I’d usually do for normal photos. Seeing this appear in-camera, exactly how I envisioned, using tools I made myself…
…now that’s magic.
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