Colors are a way to get people attention. Retailers use colors to attract people into their store, in nature colors play a role in attracting mates. In science, colors can help to attract an audience for scientific phenomena. Fabian Oefner has a fascination for science and photography and combines the two to turn scientific phenomena into art. The color help provoke interest and reaction from people. Where charts and texts can be a bit boring in terms of presentation people are automatically drawn to colors. Fabian often uses only one color in his photo’s, but multi-colored photo’s do more in terms getting an audience he’s found. For Fabian it’s an entry point to get people to see science.
Sounds waves can be heard, seen and felt. By putting pigments on a speaker Fabian made them dance to make fun pictures of the sound waves in a series called ‘Dancing Colors’ above. In the series Mille Fiori (below) Fabian studied the color wheel first to find the right sets of contrasting or analogous colors for the photo’s. This extra bit of effort suited the precise nature of this work as the actual ferrofluid shapes are about the size of a thumbnail. What happens here is that the ferrofluid, a magnetic solution with an oily structure, rearranges itself when put under a magnetic field and repels the added the water colors. This gives the special channel effect within the drop.
Click here for more photo’s on Fabian’s website, and scroll down on the page for a short film of the process.
