Dating back to the Jurassic

Museum in Los Angeles back in the 80's, and I really wanted to photograph it. Behind glass in a display case, though, and without a tripod (no tripods are allowed in museums), it was pretty much impossible to get a good picture especially with a medium format camera, the Mamiya RZ 67. So, I went up to the security booth in the museum and asked who the curator of fossils was. When I went home, I called him to see if I could get permission to take the fossil out of the case and -- hopefully -- bring it outside so I could use natural daylight to shoot it. Amazingly, the curator agreed but only if I took the fossil to the roof of the museum. I agreed, of course, very surprised that he entrusted me with this exceedingly rare piece of the Jurassic collection. He put the rock onto a tray and that's what I carried to the roof. I've never held anything so carefully in my life! It was a sunny, hazy day in L.A., and to photograph it I angled the fossil to the sun to create side lighting. This kind of light creates texture; the imprint in the rock of the dragonfly was very, very shallow, and I needed maximum texture so the shape and texture of the insect stood out. I used a Mamiya 110mm lens (equivalent to a 50mm normal lens in the full frame digital format) along with one extension tube, enabling me to focus closely. My settings were unrecorded, but I'm sure I took this with f/32 and Fujichrome Velvia 50 transparency film. To insure complete depth of field, I positioned the camera so the film plane was parallel with the plane of the rock.