Microscopically Beautiful Booze

Microscopically Beautiful Booze

Booze1

When you walk into a bar, and order a beer or another kind of drink, how often do you actually inspect it before raising it to your lips? OK, if it happens to be a cocktail, then you want the colour and taste to match your expectations, but suppose you had the power of microscopic vision, and could see how your booze appeared at that degree of vision, what you would be witness to would blow your mind, and have you looking at your drinks in a totally different way.

Booze2

Booze2

It was back In 1992 that Michael Davidson, a truly, a brilliant scientist , got the idea of branching out, in his microscopic research work, by freezing various alcoholic drinks until they crystallized, then creating slides of each individual sample, for putting under a microscope and photographing. At the time, he had been struggling with finding funding for the DNA work he normally did, at the laboratory he used ,in Florida State University science department. The idea of the alcohol research was prompted by the conversation of a friend,

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Booze3

So fascinating were the images that David produced that one Lester Hutt, from the company called ‘Bevshots MicroArt LLC’, ’ was impressed enough to purchase the rights to use them, enabling Michael to do more than fund his DNA research again for just one year, about which he was obviously delighted. Bevshots now markets these stunning images, at a prices ranging between 25 and 550 dollars, and are, unsurprisingly, proving to be very popular.

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Booze4

The images you see in this post, stunning as they are, have not been shopped , enhanced, or altered in the slightest. They simply are naturally beautiful, frozen sample slides holding segments of alcoholic drink, and nothing more. It is the physics of the light, passing through and reflecting over the slides, creating those utterly mesmerizing colors and bright images.. English Oatmeal Stout is a particularly interesting picture, and even non-drinkers will be able to appreciate the artistic merit.

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Booze5

These fabulous photographs are made using a standard light microscope, which has camera attached. In order to conjure up the amazing colors we see, the light is polarized. Individual images come about through the use of a pipette, a single drop per slide, which must be allowed to dehydrate in airtight containers, meaning each one took up to twelve weeks to produce.

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Booze6

The whole project was named the Molecular Expressions Cocktail Collection, neckties featuring various drinks being popular with customers between 1995 and 2002, when Bevshots took over, making the images into framed prints as well. The only problem was that some drinks, vodka for example, have fewer impurities than cocktails, pina colada for instance, meaning they are more difficult to dehydrate. Such problem driks needed as many as 200 attempts to get the images exactly right. Nonetheless, the end results are gorgeous.

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Booze7

The absolute best way to view these awesome slides is by shining natural light through them from the top and the side, for best effect, but any way that you do see them, you have to concede that these are images of alcohol you had never yourself imagined, and they are unforgettably glorious works of art. Whatever Michael Davidson comes up with next will no doubt be well worth waiting for
ALL IMAGES AND INFORMATION COURTESY OF BEVSHOTS.COM