Photoelasticity

[PhotoExtremist]

In order to take pictures like this, you will need to place a hard transparent plastic object between two polarizers. Make sure your object is backlit as well. Fortunately, LCD computer monitors are backlit AND have a linear polarizing material in front of the backlight, so this takes care of everything. If you go this route, all you need to do is find some cool looking plastic and stick a polarizer filter on your lens and you are set to go.

If you don't want to use a laptop computer screen or just want to to get rid of the ugly RGB pixels, use a light table with polarizing paper on top of it instead.

The polarizing filter that is on your lens can be circular or linear, it doesn't matter, but circular would be better for digital cameras. Things that work well are cheap transparent plastic cups, forks, spoons, and knifes. Prisms, plastic wrap, and cheap packaging material work good as well. Things that unfortunately don't work are water, glass, pancakes, or anything that isn't a transparent plastic (crystals might be the only exception, although this is unconfirmed).

[LeeR]

I saw a demonstration of this a number of years ago. As it turns out it is used a great deal in metallurgy to test the integrity of different shapes under stress. If you were to pull on one of these utensils under this light you would see rings appear following the lines of stress. Fascinating. However, I never thought of using this technique to produce photographic images. My loss as your have turned out nicely.

[Elvie]

Thanks. That's a neat trick. Here's my version