The world shrank for a lot of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. For photographer Tian Olivier, that included his artistic interests. He built macro rigs to capture images of insects and other tiny things, then took it a step further by building his own polarized light microscope. The birefringence of chemicals and polymers has since become the cornerstone of his creative work. Here, he says, “a torn fragment of a common plastic bag becomes a window into polymer chemistry. Tearing and stretching aligns the polymer chains in the material, altering its optical properties and producing colorful birefringence patterns under cross-polarized light.”
Submitted by Tian Olivier (@tianolivierphotos on Instagram)
