If you want to photograph the awesomeness of leaves and do not want to work too hard, the answer is a LED light pad. We used light pads in the times of botanical and entomological drawings to ink our illustrations on tracing paper. Yes, old stuff: ink, ink pens, tracing paper, tracing, stippling. It would take hours to make a drawing. Now I don’t draw anymore for work, I photograph.
This super-short tutorial is for those who use Adobe Photoshop. It is possible that you can do it with other programs, I have no idea what else is out there. To obtain the photos above,
1) First place your leaf over the light pad and take a picture from above. This is your original, color picture on white background;
2) add a black and white layer, and you will have your black and white picture on white background;
3) Disable the black and white layer and add an invert layer, and you have the inverted color picture;
4) Finally, enable the black and white layer again, and you will have a black and white picture on black background.
If you want to try this out, let me know if you have any questions!
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Wall Art landscapes and miscellaneous
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It is all about the light 
Have you experimented with varying the opacity of the layers to create intermediate blends?
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You can play with the opacity of the black and white layer but the opacity of the invert layer needs to be 100%.
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Very cool idea. I suspect you could probably do it by scanning the leaf on a flatbed scanner as well and using levels to blow the background out to pure white. I wonder how similar they would look.
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That would work too. I’ve seen amazing botanicals out of scanners
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This looks like so much fun!
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