Analogous to the way in which you can train your eye to see nature in new and different ways while out hiking through a forrest, birefringent crystals hold within themselves an inherent beauty which is not difficult to see once you learn how to look.  It is quite amazing how dramatically the appearance of a simple sugar crystal changes when viewed through crossed polarizers as the following before and after images illustrate.  Each pair of photographs are of the exact same part of a sugar crystal taken through a microscope with a magnification of about 50x.  The only difference is that the before photos are taken with unpolarized light while the after images are taken with the addition of a pair of polarizers.  The colors which appear in the cross polarized images are all produced by nature, they are not computer generated nor are have they been enhanced, you would see these same colors if you looked through the microscope eye piece with your eye instead of the camera.  There is an incredible amount of beauty in nature, but often we need to learn how to see in order to observe it.

As with all of the images on my site you can click on them to see them full size.

If you are wondering what cross polarization microphotography is, this post is my attempt to describe how these images are created.