Extreme X-Rays by Photographer Nick Veasey

X-Rays look pretty cool. If I ever had a scan and I could, I’d get the x-ray document itself and frame it.

Photographer Nick Veasey has gone one step (well, probably more steps) further than what they learn at x-ray technician schools, and shoots and specialises in x-ray “photography”.

From Wired:

“Instead of tweaking f-stops and light boxes, he fine-tunes the speed and frequency of energy pulses emitted by a Russian-made tabletop particle turbocharger. That’s because Veasey doesn’t work with traditional cameras and film — he works with x-rays.

“The 46-year-old Englishman estimates that over the past decade or so he’s x-rayed more than 4,000 objects: flowers, football players, alarm clocks, tractors, even a 777. “I’m interested in how things work, and x-rays show what’s happening under the surface,” he says. “Plus, they look cool.”

This office building scene is quite well put together with Nick capturing individual shots and then composing them all:

“To assemble this office building scene, which includes everything from a potted plant to steel elevator cogs, Veasey employed all three of his x-ray machines. Each item was captured individually (he used only one skeleton “model,” which he set in different poses) and then composited onto a master image. It took 200 x-rays to create the entire scene, including 26 shots just to depict the skeletons shaking hands.”

This shot of a vacuum tube looks straightforward, but I never realised how complicated it could be:

Veasey is one of the few people who know how hard it is to get a crisp x-ray of a vacuum tube.1 For starters, the object has very little mass to absorb the radiation. And because the edges of the tube curve away from the film, the x-rays get scattered about, causing distortion. So Veasey shot this tube in a series of 10-second bursts. The succession of blasts builds up the energy necessary to capture the fine details, while their short duration keeps background radiation from clouding the picture.

Veasey’s images have brought him fine-art commissions, big-name commercial clients, and a long list of professional honors. Now he also has a book-length collection called X-ray coming out in October. But Veasey says he’s just getting started. He is currently building his own $200,000 studio with 35-inch-thick, lead-lined concrete walls. In there, he’ll be able to see through anything.

From Wired.com

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