WINNER CATEGORY NATURE ART
Dirk Vermaire | Amino Acids Mimicking Nature

Name: Dirk Vermaire
Picture title: Amino acids mimicking nature
Category: Nature Art
Nationality: Born in Surinam to Dutch parents, living in the Netherlands
Occupation:I am an amateur photographer and am retired.

Technical information
Camera: Canon EOS R6
Lens: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x
EXIF: f/4, 1/30 sec, iso 800
Accessories: Two polarizing filters, Cognisys Stackshot 3x, Viltrox L116T LED panel, rig to mount the camera and Stackshot on, polycarbonate plate and petri dishes to prepare the crystals in.

Dirk Vermaire says:

In the last five years I have been experimenting with growing crystals, using amongst others amino acids, and photographing them with the purpose of creating images that appeal to the imagination. This image, using alanine, glutamine, and N-acetyl L-cysteine, reminds me of strange sea anemones dancing in a ray of sunlight with little fish swimming around them.

Amino acids are the stuff of life, as they are the building blocks for the proteins in all living creatures. Proteins provide structure, regulate body processes, transport materials and do a host of other things without which life would be impossible. All this thanks to the 23 amino acids that life makes use of, of which I used three in the creation of this image.

Once the crystals have been prepared, I scan the crystals with the camera under cross polarized light for interesting and appealing compositions. Some preparations show very regular patterns and may yield abstract images. Very irregular crystallization patterns offer a better chance of finding a more organic looking composition like the one in this photo. A crystal preparation is just like a landscape, you must walk through it and look at different orientations to find something of interest.

However, there are many preparations that are not interesting and then I clean the petri dish and start over again.

The crystals are made in a petri dish and are always translucent, but you can see the crystal patterns. However, if you want them to stand out, cross polarized light is needed. To do that a led light is placed behind the crystals and a polarizing filter is placed before and after the crystals. By turning one of the polarizing filters the different crystal structures can be made visible. I used a polycarbonate plate between the crystals and the second polarizing filter to add more colour to the image.

The image is stacked, as the petri-dish in which the crystals are formed, is nearly never perfectly flat or parallel to the sensor, and the dof is extremely thin at 3x magnification and an aperture of 4.