First I'd like to credit Rik and Charlie amoung many others for your contribution to this field of both science and art.
My background is marine science and I've also had a passion for photography for some time.
I'm interested in photographing subjects such as algae, zooplankton and possibly some structural coral or polyps of similar size. So ideally I guess this would be a range of 5-10 microns (algae) and 200 microns (zooplankton).
I have access to an amscope microscope at home and some Olympus and Leica microscopes at work - I believe there is also some zeiss objectives lying around without a microscope. I am not interested in 'mediocre' photography and would seek to have a database of high resolution images, which can be printed of perhaps A3 scale. This is not for any work requirements, but more so because of a general interest in photography and the lack of good taxonomic reference images for algae, which may be used as an aid for species identification at work.
So gear wise, I suspect I will require focus stacking software - what are your recommendations here - zyrene? My current camera is a 5diii, which may pose a problem since it doesn't have the greatest megapixel count or density. I do have a 'perfect photo suite' which allows resizing images to significantly larger sizes for print with minimal quality losses.
I'm not quite sure on which pathway to take for the actual photography, nor what objectives I will benefit most from. In saying this, I'm referring to my confusion of the differences between photography through:
- *An objective to Canon lens mount via an adapter and either a tube lens (I'd use a 100mm macro) or bellows (not sure which are good for these).
- Connecting my camera directly to the microscope via a C-mount of some sort and any relevant adapters - not sure how to go about this route as I have tried looking into this before and always get confused or can't find the parts I'd need
For reference some of my greatest inspirations are those from Daniel Stoupin's freshwater gallery: http://www.microworldsphotography.com/Galleries
It was actually through his photos that I found out about this kind of photography, which otherwise seems quite illusive. So my goal is to try my best at resembling that quality of photography and subject matter.
A great member here who seems to specifically deal with work I'm trying to capture would be 'jacek':
http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... highlight=
Thanks to everyone in advance.