Pop art: Swiss photographer captures the fleeting moment when multi-coloured soap bubbles wobble into life - then burst

 

Photographer Fabian Oefner captures mysterious objects that look like visions captured by the Hubble space telescope - but they're in fact ordinary soap bubbles, wobbling into life for a precious few seconds before they pop.

 Oefner used a sugar funnel to blow up the mixture from an ordinary children's pot of bubbles.

Oefneer had to use a special lighting rig to give his images their peacock-like colours, 'With this series of images, I was trying to capture the beauty of these short-lived sculptures, which consist of 99% air and actually do not have any colour at all.'

Photographer Fabian Oefner captures mysterious objects that look like visions from the Hubble space telescope - but they're in fact ordinary soap bubbles. Oefner explaisn 'Most of us remember playing with soap bubbles in our childhood, when we were fascinated by the colours of them and therefore even more disappointed when the bubble all of a sudden disappeared again.'

Fabian, a 28-year old art photographer from Zurich, was inspired by memories of blowing bubbles as a child, but put scientific principles into place to get the required results.

He explains: ‘Most of us remember playing with soap bubbles in our childhood, when we were fascinated by the colours of them and therefore even more disappointed when the bubble all of a sudden disappeared again.

‘With this series of images, I was trying to capture the beauty of these short-lived sculptures, which consist of 99% air and actually do not have any colour at all.’

But in the series he calls 'Iridient' the challenge was in lighting the subjects to make them visible to the camera and then capturing the split second before they popped.

Fabian explains: ‘There are two major challenges, when taking images of bursting soap bubbles. One is how to light the bubble, so that its colours become visible and second is obviously to capture the right moment.

‘A soap bubble is made of a thin film of water, on which soap molecules gather on both sides. The vibrant colours, that bubbles are famous for, are created by the reflected light hitting the surface of the bubble. This effect is called iridescence, a phenomenon that is also visible on the wings of the morpho butterfly or on the tail feathers of a peacock.