After 28 years of working in finance offices, Tian Olivier really wanted to pursue his long-held passions of science and photography, hoping to take photos of dragonflies and other wonders of nature. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Stuck inside his home, Olivier got an old microscope and started examining things in his indoor surroundings. Eventually he built his own microscope out of various lenses, objectives, and polarized filters to take better photos, such as this one.
In this photomicrograph, a thin film of soapy water becomes a world of psychedelic swirls thanks to the Marangoni effect. The phenomenon describes how fluids flow between areas of different surface tension. In this case, the low-surface-tension soap flows toward areas that, because of things like evaporation and uneven film thickness, have more high-surface-tension water. The result is these Marangoni flows—chaotic attempts to even out the system.
Tian Olivier built his homemade microscope (left) from a Sony camera mounted on a series of lenses and objectives. Credit:
Tian Olivier
The sharp colors arise from cross-polarized filters, which amplify a specific color depending on the film’s thickness at each point. Olivier needed to tilt the soap film just right to capture this effect, so he turned to Lego pieces to build an adjustable stage.
A gearbox made of Lego pieces allowed Tian Olivier to rotate a small soap film (left) under his microscope. Credit:
Tian Olivier
Submitted by Tian Olivier
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