Garlic

Herb

Spider Plant

Dead Daffodils

Geraniums I

Chrysalis

Snake I

Geraniums III

Geraniums II

Onion

Snake II

Tiny Bok Choy Bouquet

Cocoon

Fuzzies From Under The Bed

Dead Common Housefly

Sunflowers

Wings of a Dead Cicada

These images were taken with a USB microscope my marine biology daughter, knowing my love of image making and nature, gave to me. I think it cost about twenty dollars. There is a focus and a way to raise and lower the lights, and that's about it, that's about as sophisticated as the technical control gets that I have at my disposal. The image capture-er--I hesitate to call it a camera or even a microscope though we really are capturing light--records the light in jpegs at 72 dpi, and I control the lighting the best I can by paying attention to the background that is reflecting light back into the scene and the ambient light. I print these images small, 5 x 3 inches, centered on pieces of vertical washi paper. To me, they are as much painterly as they are photographic.

But...but, it takes an artist's eye and it takes curiosity to be making dinner and see a very tiny green slip nosing out of onion skin on the cutting board. And it take curiosity to wonder, what does this petal really look like in its own Lilliputian world? And perhaps you might think it's arrogant to say, but it takes an artist's eye and control to see a fleeting image (because hand-holding the mechanism at 500x or 800x and certainly at 1000x only intensifies camera shake) and compose it, and tap the key to capture the image.