These photographs are one of my attempts at blurring the line between science and art! All of these images are of paper-thin, transparent/transluscent slices of rocks photographed with pure 5500 degree Kelvin, white light in a microscope. I use a industrial rock saw to cut a hand-sized piece of a rock, then trim it with a oil-cooled saw with a diamond blade after which I glue a square chip of the rock to a glass slide using a special epoxy and 'cure' it with heat. Following that I hand-grind the slice with a series of grits until the slice is about 30 microns thick (a.k.a. barely visible!). I then use a 'petrologic microscope' with a special adapter tube that acts as a 'close-up bellows' and attach my 35-mm SLR film camera onto it and take the photographs. The 100 ASA film is then developed normally and the prints scanned. Magnification used is 40x so the entire area of a 600x800 pixel image is just about the size of a pencil point on the glass slide! I do not use any artificial coloration of light or materials in these photographs; all colors are how they appear under plane polarized light -- meaning light vibrating in only one plane - similar to what polarized sunglasses do - the cutting-out of the glare is what intensifies the colors that are already present in such slices of a rock. The other way to understand this is to think of a thin, colored (let's say light green) plastic sheet. If you hold just one such thin sheet against a light source - you'll be able to see the light green color, but then take a stack of a 1000 of these sheets together and what you then see is almost black/opaque. What I am doing with these photographs is a kind of "reverse engineering" with starting out with a 'thick mass of a rock' and just slicing it very thinly to get to that elusive 'thin sheet' of its composition - a thin-ness that allows for its inherent colors to become more visible. I like to think of this work as 'parting the curtains'! Enjoy!