Posts tagged ‘butterflies’
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Light Stencil Urban Art
Australian artist TigTab illuminates dark and derelict spaces with bright and colourful butterflies, dragonflies and spiders. These images appear to be digitally created, but actually they’re shot live using flashes of light through stencils.
From The Telegraph:
“My photos are predominantly shot using urban backdrops. I find beauty in decay – those abandoned and forgotten places all around us. By bringing light into the darkness of each space, it fills that space for a moment in time, and highlights both their beauty and impermanence”
The stencils are placed on light boxes lined with silver foil. The intricate designs are revealed after a burst from a camera flash lights up the inside of the box very briefly.
TigTab moves around the room, tunnel or drain, repositioning the stencils and firing the flash repeatedly while the shutter of the camera is left open to create complex designs.
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Butterfly Wings Mimicked to Combat Bank Note Forgery
British scientists have found a way of mimicking the iridescent colours on the wings of butterflies.
They studied the intricate green and blue wings on the Indonesian Peacock, or Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio blumei), whose surface structure resembles the inside of an egg carton. It’s the light bouncing off these microscopic structures which produces these unique and striking colours, rather than simple pigments. Using nanofabrication techniques, they created a structure identical to the scales of the wings, which can be used in the encryption of bank notes and credit cards, making them harder to forge (and more beautiful!).
The research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
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Artificial Butterfly Filmed in Flight
Japanese researchers Hiroto Tanaka and Isao Shimoyama have created a working replica of a swallowtail butterfly to study flight mechanics. Made from balsa wood, a rubber band, a wire crank, and with thin polymer wings, the model is the same size and weight as a real swallowtail butterfly, and flies just like one too.
Filmed in high speed, the flapping wing motion can be analysed:
