Dragonfly wing

Since you are interested in photography, I thought you'd appreciate what I did to make this image in the 1980's. This is a picture of the venation pattern of a dragonfly wing. I had found a dead dragonfly on the ground, so I took it home and in my darkroom placed it in the negative carrier in my enlarger. I put a thin, glass microscope slide on top of the wing to make it flat. This insured the image would be sharp from edge to edge (enlarger lenses virtually had no depth of field). I then loaded 8 x 10 inch black and white paper into the paper easel and made the exposure. When I developed it (developer, stop bath, and fix), the image was a negative (meaning the light and dark tones were reversed). This occurred because black and white printing is a negative-positive process. If you start with a negative (which is usually the case), the result is a positive. If you start with a positive (like a dragonfly wing), the final result is a negative. I wrote an article about this in an 80's issue of Petersen's Photographic Magazine and titled it "Zero generation photography" because no camera or film was used to create the image.