My name is Matt, Im a 28 year old DJ from the south of England with a new found passion for photomicrography! I have been lurking these forums for a couple weeks now and thought it was about time I made myself known!
I'll give you all a bit of background on where I am today and how I got here.
This post is fairly image heavy but all images are hosted on imgur so as not to destroy site bandwidth or break gallery rules, If this breaks any rules please could a mod let me know so i might rectify the problem.
It should also be noted that prior to this i had exactly ZERO experience with microscopes or macro/micro photography.
Recently (around 6 months ago) my 4 year old son expressed an interest in 'bugs', i saw this as a perfect opportunity to purchase a small microscope so we could take a closer look. Now obviously a 4 year old is going to have a problem trying to look through a monocular eyepiece so a video eyepiece was essential. after a few evenings of searching for the ideal solution i settled on a Bresser Biolux AL which we picked up for the bargain price of £28!
It had 4x, 10x and 40x objectives, came with a number of ready prepared slides and the camera output a toy like 640x480 image of a shocking quality.
"fly leg" @ 10x
"fly leg" @ 40x
None the less it was enough to get the pair of us completely hooked and so begins a steady spiral of bank account draining!
Firstly that camera had to go, after a bit of searching around I found a 1.3mp camera of a vastly superior quality that had been very well looked after and seemed to tick all the right boxes (including price luckily) as seen here
This allowed us to capture images such as these, however due to the cameras weight and the angled tube, frequent halos and flares required some inventive shimming to cure.
Mantis shed under 4x objective
The same shed @ 40x
Salt crystal @ 40x
It was about this time that i became utterly consumed by a fascination with all things tiny, I wanted to go beyond 40x and I desperately wanted alternative lighting options, increased working distance and a much needed upgrade in optics.
I accepted living with a perpetually open wallet and began the search for something "a bit better" much to the horror of the wife to be.
after a week or so of research I realised that industrial Metallurgical microscopes were spiraling down in price, I would guess due to the increased availability of zoom microscopes, so i had my eyes on a prize.
Roll forward a few more weeks and with an ebay watch list that resembled that of a budding mad scientist I stumbled upon what I think was the deal of the century.
Shown here with the Bresser for comparison. Yes, it was a bit larger than i though from the pictures i had seen on ebay!
It is a Union (tokyo) Examet 1 from, i believe, 1992, a quick clean up showed it to be in immaculate condition.
It came with 5 union Infinity plan achromat objectives,
x5/0.10,
x10/0.20,
x20/0.40,
x40/0.65 and,
x100/0.90 (dry)
and has halogen Vertical illumination with 2 filter slots, aperture diameter adjustment and a field diaphragm, a Prism (100-50/50 i think) Trinocular head and course and fine (with numerical increments) focus. I checked all 3 axis for slop or wobble and thankfully found none.
Excited to take it out for a spin I checked my pockets for change and gave it a go.
Working distance is superb.
a little bit of playing and tweaking garnered results like this
Corrosion on the copper plated steel surface of a new UK 1p coin. 40x objective.
Same patch under the 100x before I had the lens cleaned.
I was blown away by the difference in clarity and resolving power and wanted to do more with it, thats when I stumbled across this forum.
Now i would like to thank you all from the bottom of my heart, although you might not know it, you have all helped me more than i could ever imagine! The skills, equipment and results on display here are incredible. Queue some late nights reading and absorbing reams of information and it was obvious I needed to to do 2 things fast, Focus stacking and better lighting, the lighting is a work in progress and I'm unfortunately currently limited to halogen with no filters (so please excuse the colour!) but i present to you all (with many thanks) my first 'Decent' Photomicrograph.
Click for Original size
Sugar under 10x objective 50 stack using Zerene (thank you SO much for this amazing piece of software, watching the image as it pieces together is incredible)
And here we arrive at today, my next plan is some software calibration to display scale, some ideas for cold lighting and diffusion and the search for a polarizer/analyzer set with retarder plates that wont bankrupt me, the nosepiece has slots for all 3 (at least that's what I think they are) which are begging to be filled!
Any advice/tips/criticism (constructive or hillarious) would be gratefully received but you can consider me your newest assimilation
All the best guys!
Matt
