Like her friend William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of paper photography, Anna Atkins was a serious botanist who recognized the new medium’s potential to accurately record the form and structure of plants. Atkins used the cyanotype process, invented in 1842 by the scientist Sir John Herschel, which yielded prints in striking shades of Prussian blue. She placed her specimens directly on sensitized paper, covered them with glass, and set them in the sun; wherever the sunlight hit, the paper darkened, and wherever the plant blocked the rays of the sun, the paper remained white.