These psychedelic images may resemble man-made fabric weavings or coiled chains of iridescent beads, but in fact, they’re close-ups of exquisite biological beauties: peacock feathers. They’re the work of Waldo Nell, a Canadian software engineer and photographer who unites his passions for science and nature though the lens.
To create the mesmerizing series, Nell placed peacock plumes underneath an Olympus BX 52 microscope and captured hundreds of individual shots at different focal distances. Using a digital processing technique called stacking, he layered those takes together to make the final photographs, which expose nature’s capacity for dazzling intricacies that normally go unnoticed by the human eye. We’ll never look at birds the same way again.
