Photography's actually a second career for me. I was originally a research chemist.
And I got interested in photography sort of as a hobby and
realised that there had to be some way to sort of bring science and photography together.
I saw it as a way to feed my curiosity about the world around me about what happens.
My research interests are aligned pretty much with the engineering and material sciences fields
wherein, it's about photography as a tool to collect some form of data
that would be very difficult for us to collect any other way.
We may be trying to look at something in a qualitative sense, purely visually or
we may be actually using the camera to let us get some quantitative information
because with most of the high speed cameras now, for example,
there's an integrated measurement package so you can calculate things
like speeds and accelerations and angles and things like that.
But very often the image is actually used as a complementary source of data for quantitative data.
The set up times for things like this can vary.
I could probably spend much more time on any of them than I ever have at this point.
But typically, for an event that's going to be over in just a few thousandths of a second
I will spend at least half a day to a day setting it up because
it's all about getting the timing and the synchronisation of everything right.
When the event is over very quickly you've got an extremely small window of time
to actually capture it and make sure that the lights are on at the right time,
the camera's ready, all that stuff is happening properly and
that you've actually got the right stage of the event.
I've often told people that high speed photography is about
method, moment and duration;
it's how you look, it's when you look and it's for how long you look
because if any of those are wrong, you're going to see nothing.
So for the Liquid Lace photograph, I probably spent
in total, about two days working on that one photograph
between the set up and the fine tuning and the refining
to get just the right moment in making that happen.
The Liquid Lace image was created by dropping a drop of
a glycerine/water mixture into a thin film of alcohol
on a flat surface. And what you're seeing there,
the lace pattern is formed due to the differences in surface tension of those two liquids
and as they mix the liquid with the higher surface tension will tend to
pull the other liquid away and to then form the holes that then form the lace pattern.
The way in which that happens is actually used to ensure
good clean drying of wafers in IC manufacture
where dirt is an incredibly big problem and
this Marangoni effect can actually help with
making sure that they're dried in a very clean manner.
It's also the same thing that causes the tears on the side of a wine glass
if you've ever observed that when you're looking at wine.
The value of imagery in any field as a communication tool
is that it speaks so quickly to people.
If I draw on the experience I've had with my research colleagues
I had one of them say, I could sit down and go through pages and pages of data on this
but you showed me five seconds of video and I understood what was happening.
And I think that you can really get things across very, very quickly
to a very diverse, very mixed audience of backgrounds, of interests
and I think sometimes the challenge is to actually cross that Art/Science boundary a little bit
and try to create something that people want to look at long enough
to actually, now start to understand it.