Electrifying Images of Electrocuted Flowers

     San Francisco Bay Area photographer Robert Buelteman takes extraordinary images of flowers subjected to 80,000 volts of electricity. But he doesn’t use traditional equipment, not even a camera.

Buelteman's technique is an elaborate extension of what is know as Kirlian photography made popular in the late 1930s. Named after Russian inventor Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, it consists of applying a high voltage electric field near a photographic plate, which result in the appearance of coronal discharges called Kirlian auras surrounding the object being photographed.

The process is extremely tricky and so complex it has taken him 10 years – and a gruelling average of 60 hours-per-week – to produce just 80 photos.