Way back in the 70's when I had a darkroom (anyone still remember what that was?), I did an article for Petersen's Photographic Magazine titled "Zero generation photography". This referred to the fact that a film negative (or slide) was considered a first generation image and the print, or a duplicate, was second generation. But what if there wasn't an original negative or slide to begin with? A case in point is this image. It is the wing of a dragonfly. I placed the wing itself into the enlarger and made a print on black and white paper using the wing, in essence, as the negative. The print is actually the first generation, so the wing, I concluded, was the "0" generation. This is a negative image, of course, because making a black and white print was a negative > positive process or, if you start with a positive image -- i.e. the wing -- then you'd get a negative when printed. I used f/22 on the enlarger's lens to make sure the wing was sharp from edge to edge despite the fact it wasn't completely flat.
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