July 16, 2009: Electrified Plants

[xoxoxoBruce]

It took photographer Robert Buelteman 10 years, working an average of 60 hours a week, to produce 80 photographs.
Damnnnnn!

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.

Uh... um... oh.

'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.'

Ahhh, of course.

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.

At 10 years X 60 hrs/week = 80 photographs, I can see why it didn't catch on.

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