This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500.
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[HP color laser jet 2840 = $350]
Today's image comes to us from aspiring macro photographer Maxim Piessen, who explains:
A friend and I need to make a paper for school because we are in the last year of high school. Our subject: 'how is an insect built?'We cut the grasshopper in to parts. I scanned the following parts separately: legs, thorax, head, wings, abdomen.
Then, I put all the parts together in photoshop, selected them, and lined them up.
To get the nice symmetry, I used the mirror technique, reflecting all the parts across a midline.
I whitened the background and added a little more contrast to the final result.
Scanners offer an accessible way to make unusual, and unusually illustrative, images. The disassembled grasshopper was created with regular office equipment and could be used in any entomology textbook.