UniqueDaily.com

“Swimming is supposed to give you a healthy glow, but these swimmers weren’t quite sure what was going on when they took a late-night dip and turned a fluorescent shade of blue. ‘It was like we were playing with radioactive paint,’ said photographer Phil Hart who snapped the bizarre sight as his friends emerged from a lake in the dark of night. The light is created by a chemical reaction called bioluminescence, which happens when a naturally-occuring micro-organism in the water is disturbed. Phil, 34, put his camera on a very slow shutter speed and threw sand and stones into the water to cause the reaction and capture as much of the blue haze as possible. These images are particularly stunning because the concentration of the micro-organism ‘Noctiluca Scintillans’ was abnormally high when he took the photos at Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, Australia. Phil said: ‘To be there watching this bioluminescence is spellbinding and to see it like this is very rare. ‘I am a program director with an organisation that has been running canoeing camps on the Gippsland Lakes for 50 years. Nobody can remember the bioluminescence ever being as bright as this.” w/ photos