The 40d liveview when tethered to a computer should work quite well for focusing when attached to the microscope. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do it differently. One nice thing the Canon software does is let you adjust focus from the computer. I have the Olympus e330 and unfortunately th...

Well, you could just make your own: http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3830 In practice, I've found my tripod isn't as stable as I thought when I purchased it. The pano head is stable, but the legs aren't. I need to wait from 5 to 10 seconds after touching the camera or pano head ...

Can you post some pictures of the setup?

Again, this is a case where "outside the box" greatly simplifies the analysis. Once you've established the illumination, positioned the lens, set the diameter of the aperture, established the field of view, and determined how long to leave the shutter open, then you've established how many photons ...

No inside info here, but I think it will bear watching for this type of project.

Take a look at Microsoft Photosynth. It may do the stitching for you. http://www.labs.live.com/photosynth/

What's the URL?

I just ran across this DIY ringlight using fiber optics: http://fuzzcraft.fuzzphoto.eu/ringlight4-0.html

Is there a good way to determine the best type of fiber optic cable to use for this?

If you have Photoshop, try using one of the "Paint with Light" actions from http://www.atncentral.com. They are actually just dodge and burn actions that can sometimes remove haze and surface glare.

Well that certainly cured the sharpening/contrast problem. Unfortunately it cured it a little too well and the image turned out quite soft. I'll have to play with the settings to see if there's a happy medium

rjlittlefield wrote:Nice work, Ed!

I'm curious, though -- what was it about this shot that motivated manual stacking?

--Rik

Sometimes the output from CombineZ5 looks a little harsh and I haven't progressed very far past the "Do Stack" stage with it.

Well, I'm sure everyone knows what a viburnum is :) This is manually stacked from 25 images. 35mm macro appx. 1:2 f11 1/80 sec http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v649/etfrench/21937sw.jpg Larger version here: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v649/etfrench/21937s.jpg And here's the snoot: http://img....

Myself, that's why you can see all the machining marks I have a Harbor Freight mini-mill and min-lathe. The first pano head could be built without the mill and lathe, but I used both quite a bit on this one.

I'm curious about the pixel counts. I think I'm hearing 4768x6550 from only 2 frames. That suggests a really big sensor or some resizing after the shoot. What's the story? For some reason, I had ACR output set to 12mp instead of 7.5. I suppose now I'll have to pixel peep to see if there is any deta...

Here's version 2 of my spherical pano head. Major changes from the original, http://www.tawbaware.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?t=3508, are: 1. Landscape or Portrait mode: The main reason for adding landscape mode is my Olympus e330 LiveView LCD is a lot easier to use in landscape mode. It also gives mor...