Veasey is one of the few people who know how hard it is to get a crisp x-ray of a vacuum tube.1 For starters, the object has very little mass to absorb the radiation. And because the edges of the tube curve away from the film, the x-rays get scattered about, causing distortion. So Veasey shot this tube in a series of 10-second bursts. The succession of blasts builds up the energy necessary to capture the fine details, while their short duration keeps background radiation from clouding the picture.Not many photographers need a linear accelerator. But Nick Veasey isn't your average shutterbug. Instead of tweaking f-stops and light boxes, he fine-tunes the speed and frequency of energy pulses emitted by a Russian-made tabletop particle turbocharger. That's because Veasey doesn't work with traditional cameras and film — he works with x-rays.
The 46-year-old Englishman estimates that over the past decade or so he's x-rayed more than 4,000 objects: flowers, football players, alarm clocks, tractors, even a 777. "I'm interested in how things work, and x-rays show what's happening under the surface," he says. "Plus, they look cool." To get his pictures, Veasey uses industrial x-ray machines typically employed in art restoration (to examine oil paintings), electronics manufacturing (to inspect circuit boards), and the military (to check tanks for stress fractures).
Working with high doses of radiation isn't always easy. To minimize a patient's radiation exposure, medical x-ray techs grab their blurry stills in a fraction of a second; Veasey needs to bombard his subjects with ionizing radiation for as long as 12 minutes to get crisp shots. So to capture human forms, Veasey works with either skeletons in rubber suits (normally used to train radiologists) or cadavers that have been donated to science. When a corpse becomes available, he has at most eight hours to pose and shoot before rigor mortis sets in.
Veasey's images have brought him fine-art commissions, big-name commercial clients, and a long list of professional honors. Now he also has a book-length collection called X-ray coming out in October. But Veasey says he's just getting started. He is currently building his own $200,000 studio with 35-inch-thick, lead-lined concrete walls. In there, he'll be able to see through anything.
To assemble this office building scene, which includes everything from a potted plant to steel elevator cogs, Veasey employed all three of his x-ray machines. Each item was captured individually (he used only one skeleton "model," which he set in different poses) and then composited onto a master image. It took 200 x-rays to create the entire scene, including 26 shots just to depict the skeletons shaking hands. 
The largest x-ray film is only 14 inches wide, so to capture items bigger than that — like this pair of DJ decks measuring 4 feet across — Veasey stitches together several shots in Photoshop. That's also where he adds color to the black-and-white images for "technical grace." The challenge with electronics, Veasey says, is the way the chaotic interiors complicate the image. 
Veasey borrowed a cargo x-ray scanner normally used to search trucks crossing into the US from Mexico to create this image. Once he scanned the vehicle, Veasey used Photoshop to populate it with skeletons and objects he shot separately (yes, he x-rayed a fedora). A hospital in White Plains, New York, commissioned the piece to celebrate the opening of its new orthopedic facility. The medical center's PR team had a promotional bus wrapped in the image drive around White Plains for nearly two months. Aug. 19, 1839: Photography Goes Open Source
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