I have been photographing for more than 20 years. I am drawn to making photographs of things that are challenging or difficult to capture (astrophotography, extreme macro, ferrofluid structures etc.). Since the first of the lockdowns, I have been buying and pressing into service a series of 1960s - 1990s research microscopes. These have been configured with polarising filters and homemade and cobbled-together phototubes and adapters and used to allow my camera to capture the wonders of the shapes, patterns and wild colours of crystals of various substances (often sugar alternative sweeteners) in polarised light. After refining the process and being recommended almost daily that I should have an exhibition or make a book, this project has evolved from an interesting photographic path into a proper artistic foray. A commercial gallery in London has offered to show 16 large Chromaluxe printed images in an exhibition from the 10th until the 31st of March 2023. These colourful abstract photographs have transformed from a hobby within a hobby into an exciting new commercial venture. Without this particular branch of my interest in photography, I do not think my photographs would ever have seen the inside of a gallery on their own merit.

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About
Bevil Templeton-Smith has been a programmer and IT consultant in London for 29 years. During this time, he has also learned all he could about photography and taken many assignments to photograph products, people, events, and the wonders of nature, from Astrophotography to nature photography, landscapes, macro, extreme macro, and now photography through a microscope. Pointing the camera down the microscope is a project that has piqued the interest of various people in the art world, and after much encouragement from his friends and family, as well as from Facebook and Instagram followers, Bevil has established a relationship with a commercial fine art gallery in Notting Hill, Alveston Fine Art. They have offered to show a series of 16 of Bevil’s large format photographs, printed using Chromaluxe on an aluminium substrate. The photographs represent tiny portions of a microscope slide but uncover a wondrous world of colour, shape and pattern.