Just starting out.

[protist_shepard]

Hey folks,
I thought I might pick myself up a microscope.. brace yourself.. chinese m600 by Amscope.




Here's the story.. there's a rotting support brace in the basement of my apartment.. there's a mudhole underneath it.. standing water.. naturally I was curious what was in this bad boy.. at first there was nothing except for some worms which were PRETTY COOL.. but then I added some boiled snow water to the mix and let it sit 2 weeks... came back to it and TOTAL PARTY.

Now for some pictures..


Captured an interesting DOF shot of a rotifer out of focus.. thought it was cool for just messing around.. Olympus T-100 handheld held up to the eyepiece.


What IS THAT THING?! Olympus T-100 handheld held up to the eyepiece.


Celestron Digital Microscope Imager 44421
'

Celestron Digital Microscope Imager 44421


Celestron Digital Microscope Imager 44421

Trying to figure out my next move here.. the handheld shots are interesting.. only problem there is no remote fire on the hand-held.. so even if I get an adapter going there will be some blur.. I mean right the subject will blur too if it's moving..I might open it up and try and jury rig an external button for firing off the shot...

I have an olympus e-410 4/3s camera.. looking at adapter options.. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Olympus-OM-4-3- ... 3a7d209b94 looks interesting..

OR

I'm just going to hang around here and look at some of the excellent setups and figure out if I can pull any of this stuff off..

Thanks for looking,
Garrett

[protist_shepard]

So, I got the above adapter for my E-410, messing around with some LED lighting, I think these are at .10. Plan to do some more tests... obviously lightning needs some work.. Photoshop'd these a little.

[Charles Krebs]

Garrett,

These are nice, and interesting compositions as well.

While I wouldn't normally suggest looking into image stacking when first starting out, with a subject like this you could easily do a few "variations" with only a small image "stack".

[protist_shepard]

Charles! The myth! The man! The legend!

Appreciate the words of encouragement.

Per your suggestion I downloaded the trial of zerene and tried it on a couple stacks of images.. sure is handy that it does all that calculating by itself..



I can see some errors here and there, but I'm happy with the results of my introduction to z stacking. I could have done worse. Don't really have an idea of what to do next.. I need to get some stationary LED lights.

Probably pick up a couple of those Ikea ones that I've seen floating around in different setups.

Trying not to overwhelm myself with the more technical stuff just yet. I definitely need to slow down and plan my next purchase more wisely. These BHS DIC setups look awesome.. but complicated..

Definitely going to experiment more and figure out what direction I want to go in.

[protist_shepard]

So, some more experiments.

This is a dried berry with sugar crystallization.

Another one of these is a berry with mold.

I apologize for not being scientific and keeping track of my objectives.

Starting to get an eye for the CA that's occurring here, obviously my cobbled together setup is going to have that issue...

Really learning a lot about my camera, microscopes and the world I didn't know before, so that's awesome..

[protist_shepard]

Testing the limits of my setup here, my ikea lights came in..

[NikonUser]

An Oly BHS on ebay, currently at $500.00. Looks like it has a Phase Contrast condenser.
Worth a lot more than $500.00
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Olympus-BH2-Mic ... 33803d8ff9

[protist_shepard]

(A week later)

I was outbid! Blast.


In other news, I bought a optiphot. Long story. Dinner time.