What you see on this site aren't photographs – at least not in the traditional sense. The camera in this case is a high-end digital scanner, with the flowers arranged face down on the open glass of the scanner and the image taken in a darkened room. The picture is then retouched with a computer only to remove any stray pollen or dust, being careful to never alter the original arrangement, preserving the integrity and natural beauty of the plants.  Since this editing is often done at a level of nearly 1/300th of an inch level, each picture can require 10 to 20 hours or more to complete.

Here's an example showing the close-up editing of a small, hairy leaf.  The circle is the editing paintbrush, where I am carefully going around the edges to make them black.  Further away from the leaf has already been painted black, but now the close-up work takes place. You can see the not-quite-black background that is slowly being erased to pure black, ensuring that the leaf (and all if it's hairy appendages!) are left intact.  The editing circle is about 1/175 of an inch.

The scans are made at very high resolution, typically 1200 dots per inch, so the final images can be printed four times the original size or more without affecting the print quality, making for some stunning close-ups of flowers and leaves, down to the pollen on stamens or hairs on a stem.

The images on this site, as a JPEG files, are only a fraction of the quality and resolution of the original source scan TIFF files that are used to make the prints.  The TIFF format does not lose image quality in compression, unlike JPEG and many other formats.  Because of this, the source files for the artwork on this site can be quite large -- 400MB or more -- but the resulting image quality is well worth the disk space.

Sometimes the scanned images yield interesting surprises.   This fragment of an image, approximately 36 times the original image size, turned up a nearly microscopic green insect egg!

This tiny insect wing turned up when performing close-up editing of Mirrored Hosta.  Even the individual veins and the sheen on the wing show up clearly on the image, even though this is enlarged about 6-8 times.

Prints are made on Epson Premium Luster photo on an Epson 9800 printer and K3 Photo Black ink.  The paper and inks are archival quality independently rated to last at least 70 years.  Matting is done with rag (not paper) mats to provide a resultant work that should last for generations.

Take the Quiz

Sometimes the the up-close images can look quite different than the broader view.  Check out these extreme close-ups to see if you can identify the source!   Once you think you know, move your mouse over the answer bar to reveal the answer.