My pursuit of photographic images isn't limited to the cute, cuddly, and beautiful. For me, anything goes as long as it holds my attention. This is a 'portrait' of a black widow spider, and I must say this arachnid really redefines the word, ugly. I shot this with a scanning electron microscope, and I added color in Photoshop because all SEM imagery is black and white. A friend of mine found the spider in his garage and saved it for me because he knew I was looking for cool things to shoot with this remarkable device. The black widow was too large to fit on the stage, or platform, inside the vacuum chamber of the SEM, so I had to use a dissecting microscope to separate the head from the body. Do you remember in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark when Harrison Ford -- as Dr. Jones -- looked down into a pit of snakes and said, "Why did it have to be snakes?" That's how I am with spiders. So, to use a razor blade and decapitate this dreadful creature, especially greatly magniied, was somewhat repugnant. Nevertheless, for a picture, I'll do a lot of unpleasant things. When the head was separated, it then had to be coated in a very thin layer of gold (two or three angstroms thick, i.e. 2 or 3 billionths of a meter). In a vacuum chamber filled with argon gas, gold vaporizes. Once coated with hardened gold mist, the specimen was bombarded by an electron gun, and the electrons that bounded off the specimen formed the image.
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