As long as I'm posting some of the unusual subjects I've photographed and the unusual techniques used, I have to include an image done with a scanning electron microscope. This is an SEM image of a very small ant species. It is magnified 100x, and I added the color in Photoshop because SEM images are always black and white. Notice the ball and socket joints at the base of the antennae, just like our shoulders and hips. After trying to gain access to one of these machines for 2 years, I finally was allowed to rent time on one at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. At the first, the control panel was very intimidating. Buttons, knobs and dials everywhere! But I learned how to coat the specimens with an ultra thin layer of gold in a vacuum chamber and then, in the SEM itself, when the specimen was bombarded with electrons that bounced off the gold layer to form an image, I learned how to work the X, Y, and Z axis for the composition I wanted. With a single dial, I could go from 10x to 50,000x! The camera was built into the SEM. Now the images are digital, but in the 90's they were recorded on polaroid film and then I scanned the negatives to digitize them.
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