Just now I tried shooting my (ancient) iPhone 6s+ through a 10x Bausch & Lomb Hastings triplet. I had tried an ancient Spencer binocular single element eyepiece years ago with iffy results. I just tried my 10x current cheap binocular microscope eyepiece with my Pixel5 phone "1x" lens (Cellphone mag...

I did try an infinity objective - just in front of the phone camera lens and at a small distance without any joy. Also, for some phones, there's a convenient way to mount the objectives. Moment - a phone accessory company - sells cases with a kind of bayonet mount and have a threaded adapter for fil...

Can you attach a microscope objective more or less directly to a smartphone camera? I've googled and searched the forums and haven't found anyone who has even tried this. I understand intermediate optics will be required, but hopefully not a whole microscope with eyepiece etc. You would probably als...

When I was looking in to baffles a while ago, I ran into the same idea of using reflective rather than matte materials (a popular strategy for telescopes), but I think it was Rik who pointed out that is really a strategy for infrared. Matte surfaces do work better for visible light. This paper talks...

Wonderful! Thanks for posting this. I had actually been following the photographer, Andy Murray, on Flickr for a while without knowing anything about him (or micro fauna, really), so it's great to see the photos presented this way. Here's his Flickr stream for anyone curious: https://www.flickr.com/...

I just want to second Chris S.'s suggestion about the laser. I put one together per his guide and it made life a ton easier (and I am not mechanically very handy). Trying to get a bug eyeball centered in the frame is no easy game without it. Some others suggested just holding a flashlight to your vi...

I haven't tried this, but, to use DCRAW with your sraw/sraw2 files, you might try converting to DNG (Adobe's Digital Negative universal raw format) using their free DNG converter and then using DCRAW on the DNG.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/digital-negative.html

Thanks! I don't have any photos of the setup but it's pretty basic. Microscope focus block with no electronics -- all hand cranked. I'm always experimenting with lighting so most of these shots are different (I owe a lot to photoshop for fixing experiments gone too far). My favorite lighting is a tu...

I love this lens and saw it for cheap on ebay this morning, so I thought I'd pass this along, seeing as I already have one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1pc-Mitutoyo-Mitutoyo-Qv-objective-2-5x-xhg44-/301947202030? Mitutoyo QV 2.5x is kind of an odd objective. I think it was made for a particular measurin...

I'm not very experienced with microscopes (understatement), but was in the same boat as you looking for a stereo microscope for bug examination and prep. I figured I didn't need anything fancy and bought an old brown heavy steel Swift for not a lot of money. It only had two magnifications, neither i...

I think the lighting also makes these photos very distinctive. In the video, it sounds like his motivation for the stitched panoramas was at least as much about controlling the lighting on different parts of the bug as it was about getting the enormous detail (in fact, the detail really peters out b...

Thanks for posting this. Really great stuff. In the video he describes shooting multiple stacks for each bug in order to have different lighting for different part, which, in addition to taking A LOT of time, must be pretty interesting to composite. The Stackshot probably helps with repeating the ex...

I think you might get better results with a much simpler setup. For example, on the camera side, remove the geared tripod head so the stackshot is mounted more or less directly on the microscope focus block (you may need some spacing depending on those bits of the focus block you have sticking up at...

That's a great idea ChrisR! I've been doing pretty much exactly that with Zerene stacker DMap and PMax stacks - using the DMAP (maybe slightly blurred to lessen artifact effects) as a color blended layer on top of a Pmax layer. That way you get the nicer colors (usually) of the Dmap stack on top of ...

To my eye... you can get to the ChrisR corrected image with: Photoshop->Camera Raw->Lens Corrections->Color Defringe (to taste). I think I got to this look with Purple Amt = 5 Hue = 15/67 Green Amt =3 Hue = 29/88 Though without knowing the bug, it's hard to know whether the eye should have some blue...