Theme: The Result of Science
Award: Highly Commended
Photographer: Sarah Cannavino
On CSI one day, there was a scene where there was a great chemical reaction, which inspired this picture. During the episode, the power was out from a bad storm and in the lab there were no windows and no lights either. They needed some type of light to examine the evidence from the crime that had been committed, but candles were not efficient help. Turns out they had the correct chemicals to create a significant amount of light to see what they were doing. They used luminal, potassium hydroxide, potassium ferricyanide and hydrogen peroxide to create this reaction. This inspired me because of the colors and how amazing it looked when the chemicals mixed. Having tried this multiple times before I got this shot, I had found out it worked much better when adding all the chemicals into a glass jar at the same time rather than creating two separate mixtures first then adding the two separate mixtures together. This shows the reaction of the chemicals mixing with each other as they are being combines forming the blue sprinkled light effect. This strong blue chemiluminescence reaction resulted from oxidation of the luminal compound and was efficient in transforming chemical energy into light energy by the molecules that emit light.