Most Gdański

A couple of days ago I was out in the evening to take pictures of the tram tracks on Most Gdański, a cool truss bridge across the Vistula in Warsaw. The temperature was about -12°C, but with the strong wind on the river it felt much, much colder. My bicycle gloves, which are fine while moving, were completely inadequate for standing still taking pictures.

However, I was apparently not alone taking photos there, though I didn't even see the guys in the picture above until I came home and looked at the picture on the screen.
I also wanted to test my new tripod by taking some long exposure shots of the illuminated Most Śląsko-Dąbrowski. That turned into a fiasco when I realised how much the bridge was moving due to the heavy trucks, trams and buses...

I had to increase the ISO a lot and time the photo to the trams to manage to get a decent picture.

Ferrofluid

A colleague and I spent some time playing around in the lab with a ferrofluid and a strong neodymium magnet. And a camera, of course. Ferrofluids are supercool and look almost unreal. A few more pictures can be found in my gallery here, and loads of them on Flickr - many a lot better than mine.

With the magnet closer the spikes become smaller and denser. The curve hexagonal pattern of light dots in the lower part comes from light scattered off the tips of out-of-focus spikes. The spikes form a hexagonal pattern on the surface as clearly seen below.

A hexagonal pattern of large spikes.

I didn't have a green lamp, so the colour comes from shining a white lamp through a solution of nickel salt.

Polish quality roads

I often complain about the traffic in Poland, which is dreadful. However, the roads are in similar class. This is not a village road out in the country, but in the centre of the capital. Unfortunately this state of roads is not uncommon after a hard winter. And when spring comes it is patched together and makes a horrible surface for driving or bicycling. No wonder most Warsovian cyclist have mountainbikes, even if the city is flat as a table.

Churches

One thing that is definitely not hard to find in Warsaw is churches. Anywhere in the city you cannot walk for five minutes without stumbling over one. This large church is less than a kilometer away from this monstrosity.

Chemicals through the lens

Another picture from the lab. This time our shelf of solvents seen through a glass flask.

Hot

A sample is beeing annealed in a ceramic boat in a quartz tube furnace. The temperature is 900°C and the colour is (close to) natural blackbody radiation.

The weather has been miserable recently and I haven't felt like taking the camera out for a walk. The next couple of days you'll have to make do with some pictures from the lab.