A dog flea at 60x

When I post AI images, I explain that I love making images and it doesn't matter how I get there -- whether it's a camera, or software, or an electron beam, or even mental telepathy if I had that ability. I don't care. I just love the artistry of making great images. In this case, I used a scanning electron microscope with a built-in polaroid camera. I took this image of a dog flea in the 90's before digital cameras, so the SEM used a polaroid camera to record images formed by an electron beam striking the specimen which had been coated with a very thin layer of gold. The procedure was this: Place the flea into a vacuum chamber in which argon gas is pumped. In the presence of argon, gold vaporizes. This ultra thin metal coating is needed because the next step is to bombard the gold-covered flea with an electron beam which bounces off the metal and forms an image on what's called a secondary electron detector. The polaroid camera then photographs this, and I end up with a black and white negative. All SEM images are black and white; I used Photoshop to add color. The magnification here was 60x. One of the characteristics of SEM's is their incredible depth of field. Fleas are amazing creatures. They are armored with, essentially, heavy plates. I've never published this before; I thought this might be of interest to some of you.