Craig Burrows
Sometimes, the most beautiful things are those you can’t see with the naked eye.
Take flowers, for instance. As beautiful as they are in normal lighting conditions, their true colors come out when you see them under ultraviolet light.
For the past three years, artist Craig Burrows has been shining a light on how flowers look under UV light, a style known as ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence photography.
Burrows combs his neighborhood in the Los Angeles-area, looking for flowers and then puts them in a room that is as dark as he can possibly get. When he shines an ultraviolet light on the petals, these flowers will come to life.
“Doing UVIVF photography is actually something that got me into gardening, since I wanted to grow certain flowers to photograph,” Burrows told The Huffington Post by email.
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Burrows said things like dust can have a major impedance on his photos, so he started growing his own. "I have concerns that bought flowers would be more problematically covered in man-made glowing dust particles,” he said.
Burrows is constantly surprised by his flower photographs: Some plants just aren’t as UV photogenic as others.
“I recently photographed some bottlebrush, which I expected to be quite spectacular,” Burrows said. “Instead, the leaves glowed brightly and the flower part lacked brightness but had some very interesting color differentiation based on the anatomy.”
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The most consistently colorful flowers are sunflowers, or flowers closely related to them, Burrows has discovered. “They have pollen which glows especially brightly,” he said.
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