July 16, 2009: Electrified Plants
It took photographer Robert Buelteman 10 years, working an average of 60 hours a week, to produce 80 photographs.
Damnnnnn!
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Working in complete darkness, he begins by placing his chosen plant onto a metal board which he then passes the electrical surge through.
He can even pinpoint areas where he wants to focus the charge using a wand and a simple car battery.
As his subject lights up with the current, and emits radiation invisible to the naked eye, Mr Buelteman captures the moments by passing a fibre optic cable back-and-forth over the plant. The cable emits a beam of white light which is just the size of a human hair and whatever the miniscule torch-beam touches, transfers the image onto film.
The captivating blue haze that surrounds every leaf, petal and stalk is actually gases ionising around them as the plant is electronically shocked.
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Uh... um... oh.
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'You just have to imagine it like a painter creating a picture on canvass,' he said. 'The plant is the subject just like the painter's bowl of fruit or the person they are capturing.
'The electrified board I place the plants on is the canvass. The fibre optic cable emitting the light-beam is my paintbrush.
'Another way to try and understand it is like a normal photograph on a normal camera, except I am manually controlling the exposure by hand. In the same way the image I capture is simply burned onto film.'
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Ahhh, of course.
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But despite these being the first pictures of their kind in his profession, Mr Buelteman says he has in fact invented nothing and uses a combination of age-old techniques developed decades ago. Semyon Kirlian - developer of Kirlian photography - accidentally found in 1939 that it was possible to photograph electrical discharges at the edges of objects if that were being shocked on an electrified plate.
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At 10 years X 60 hrs/week = 80 photographs, I can see why it didn't catch on.
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The descent of man ~ Nixon, Friedman, Reagan, Trump.
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