My new set up: Getting rid of all that glass!

Iainp · Post by **Iainp** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 7:22 am

Guys, thank you for all your advice regarding my set up and ideas for improving the quality of my images.

(http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... php?t=8231)

My original set up was this: Nikon D60 with 18-55mm lens, attached (well, suspended by tripod...) above the head of a trinoc microscope, with 4X objective

I was happy with the resulting images but they were a little "muddy" lacked that "edge" and the contrast was poor. Also there were issues with blue and red fringing in the lighter areas.

The suggestion was that I should simplify the set up by removing the head of the scope and also removing the camera lens, so in effect the microscope just becomes the equivalent of a bellows set up.

The result of getting rid of all that glass?

A HUGE improvement in image quality!

Now the camera rests on a set of cheap extension tubes and some rolled up black card:

I wasn't expecting much on the first run and I thought the new set up would be far too unstable to allow serious stacking. To my great surprise though, 100+ images of a bee's eye stacked in ZS produced this:

Still sharp and clear with a closer crop:

And sttill looking good with a very tight crop:

NikonUser · Post by **NikonUser** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 8:04 am

Wow! That's a BIG improvement.
Do you have the SP 4X Plan objective, or is this with the standard Semi-Plan 4X?

There is a lot of truth in the KISS principle.

g4lab · Post by **g4lab** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 12:56 pm

I have always thought that the less glass the light goes through the better the image will be unless the glass is really really fancy. (ie PlanApos used perfectly)

Beautiful stack!

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 1:15 pm

Now that's a striking improvement. I'm glad to see the suggestions helped out.

I'm also pleased to see that even the corners of these images do not show chromatic aberration (CA, color fringing).

CA was really the only thing that worried me about the objective-only scheme.

The lighting here worked out better than I expected. You have a nice capture of the feathered hairs, and also a clean rendition of the very smooth surface of the eye.

--Rik

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 1:21 pm

Looking closer at your setup, I have a couple of questions:

1) Are those tiny diffusers hanging in front of the fiber optic tips? If so, what are they made of?

2) Which fiber illuminator did you decide to go with, and how is it working out for you?

--Rik

Iainp · Post by **Iainp** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 11:59 am

I've been away for the weekend and it was great to step though the door to find these positive comments waiting for me

NU: it's been a few years since I got the scope, and can't clearly remember which lenses I bought. I think the 10X came as standard, and I have a feeling that the 4X I bought as an accessory. Can you ID from the photo?

Rik: yes, I was surprised how well the lighting worked out on this one. I'm looking forward to getting some more images taken ASAP just to prove to myself that it wasn't beginner's luck.

Re Fiber Illuminator: g4lab advised against the cheap Chinese ones. I bought one anyway (Halogen GX-301 from Gain Express) It broke within a week...

Luckily my brother's excellent at fixing this sort of thing, and glued the arm that had come away from the main body, with carbon fiber chord and superglue. Apart from that hiccup I'm very pleased with it.

Interesting you mention the lack of CA. With the 4X, everything looks fine, but the 10X - which previously gave good results with my old set up - is completely unusable with the new setup.

Here's a single image of a cranefly's eye. (The lack of sharpness is due to camera shake)

My diffuser: I tried pingpong balls but they seemed to block out too much light, then I tried pieces of milk carton tied to the end of the arms with elastic bands but in the end I found the best results with the handle of the milk carton:

I think I might still need to diffuse some more; the highlights on the bee are beginning to blow out on the full head shot here:

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 12:51 pm

Iainp wrote:Interesting you mention the lack of CA. With the 4X, everything looks fine, but the 10X - which previously gave good results with my old set up - is completely unusable with the new setup.

Sounds like you have compensating eyepieces that are matched to the 10X but not the 4X. In that case you should see color fringes if you use the 4X with the eyepieces.

Here's a single image of a cranefly's eye. (The lack of sharpness is due to camera shake)

The blur is not necessarily camera shake. CA also introduces radial smearing within each RGB band because different wavelengths give slightly different image sizes. The clue is to look around the image. If the blurs are all slanted the same direction, then you probably have camera shake. If they're all radial, and the center of the image is sharp, then it's CA.

--Rik

NikonUser · Post by **NikonUser** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 1:26 pm

Iain
I was curious about your scope as I bought my first microscope from Brunel's in 1952 (then in High Holborn, London).

In their current objectives the colur bands are near the thread on the Plan and near the lens on the Semi-Plans. This would make your lenses Semi-Plans.
I thought that the price for a new Plan 4x (at about 50 pounds) was reasonable, it is about what I paid for a used Nikon 4X. If your images are from the Semi-Plan 4X then one can expect even better-quality images from the Plan 4X and that would make the Plan 4X a bargain.

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 2:43 pm

To check it might be easiest to make your own test targets. I did a couple in MS Word, of all things, which is good enough.

I used the "grid", at 1mm, and made lines on the grid, width 0.1 point, and "dotted". Then a few circles, diameters in multiples of 1mm or 3mm.
I printed on a laser printer - inkjet would be equally good for the purpose.
Of course any lens will SEE the lines , but you can use the grid itself to check the magnification, and look at the dots, splatter and whatnot to look for CA, field curvature, and high contrast resolution.
Something like spray-mount or glue and card would be a good idea but I found stiff paper could be made flat enough for low mag objectives.
It's easy to light, being flat, and the exposure meter will make the white a mid grey so nothing's burned out if you add half a stop. You don't get the "funny" diffraction type patterns either!
I had to use flash or the vibration blur was drowning the differences in resolutions!

(I'm interested to see which of my bits will cover 24 x 36, so the emphasis of my inspection is shifted - for another thread sometime)

Here's one I was using. The colour is irrelevant on a mono printer. To show this I "Printed as PDF" then took a screenshot, so it is NOT the same (not as useful!) as the printer produced, but you get the idea.
http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/u ... rid1_1.jpg

By the way I tried a cheap old looking black Olympus 4x/0.1 which gave what looked to me a very acceptable account of itself.

Iainp · Post by **Iainp** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 3:32 pm

Wow, so much to consider and to experiment with. Shame I have to go to work tomorrow...

So, NU, it sounds like the Plan will be the next step; I'll take a look at the Brunel catalogue now. I knew that credit card would come in handy

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 6:56 pm

Nikon Plan or Olympus Plan? Plan is field flatness, not lack of CA.
The Oly ones still will expect eyepiece correction so you'll really want Niks for direct projection. Presumably you might then see "over" correction of your eyepiece but you'll have to get used to it or, £££.
So it's the s/h market. You can presumably still buy finite tube length optics, but they're expensive.
Confused? See that recent thread on Which Nikon Objectives.

To summarise - if I have it right:
The old Niks needed eyepiece correction, but at some point, as Charles indicates in his earlier posts, they started making the CF (ca free) type. But they didn't, at that time, mark them as such. There were/are Metallurgical ones (M) and Biological ones, where a coverslip thickness is shown. At 10x, NA 0.25 or 0.3, it makes llittle or no difference which of those two we use.

Here's a NON CF plan Nik:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Nikon-microscope- ... 286.c0.m14

NU has posted a pic of his CF one. There are Nik objectives which look like that without CF printed on them, which ARE CF.

Also, there are these, where the M means metallurgical, ie no coverslip, but at low NAs that doesn't matter anyway. If I've got it right, here's an example, of an M Plan which IS CF, before they marked them:
Someone hopefullly will confirm!!
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NIKON-349507-M-PL ... 286.c0.m14

For when that link doesn't work any more, that is the plain cylinder, no black base, Nikon M Plan 10x/0.25 210/0.
NB no chunky 3 rings of grippy chrome knurling which the Biologicals have. The WD is adequate, and it's nearly as good as the 10x 0.3 160/0.17 (biological, hence a coverslip thickness specified) which is widely popular here http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/u ... 1003_1.jpg , but usually much cheaper.
Again, that last pictured one IS CF, but wasn't marked as such.

I hope that's all a) correct and b) clear!

Iainp · Post by **Iainp** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 11:42 pm

Thanks very much Chris. To my great surprise, that IS clear; normally when people start throwing numbers at me I lose it

It looks like I have some homework to do and I'll be keeping a closer eye on ebay too.

NikonUser · Post by **NikonUser** » Mon Oct 12, 2009 4:07 am

Good advice from ChrisR.
Images of perhaps the 7 best 4x lenses were shown by dmillard
HERE
I have the Plan 4 (lower left) which I really like.

I doubt the Brunel Plan 4x is of the same quality as any of these. But IF Iain's 4x is a Semi-Plan (flat and sharp in centre but some curvature at the edges) THEN the Brunel Plan 4x (flat across the entire field) at should be at least as good if not better.
Rik saw no CA with Iain's curent 4x.

Bottom line perhaps: patience and get some S/H Nikon CF (or M) Plans ( 2x, 4x, 10x)

I still believe that for 1x-10x a camera/bellows/translation stage or equivalant is the way to go.
It allows one to use a variety of lenses, including Iain's 90mm macro and the superb El-Nikkor 50/2.8 enlarger lens (in reverse). A microscope setup restricts you to the very small diameter of the RMS thread (sometimes referred to as the Royal Screw)

Either way, scope or bellows, you still need a good 4x.

PS: Chris S goes as high as a 60x objective with his bellows setup, and not a microscope in sight
HERE

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Mon Oct 12, 2009 6:10 am

As I'm housebound, I've been playing with some 10x lenses on a microscope.
I must say the rotating head is an advantage

Iain Save your money, for now anyway.
WIth 4 on there, including an old Olympus 184878 10x /0.25 which came bundled with half a microscope I bought "for parts", and a Nik CF 10x/0.3, after a while I couldn't be sure which was which. That's looking at the live view screen, which blows up to x about 14 ( I think I said 27 once before, but that's in review, not preview) so I'm looking at part of a 42 inch screen with 4 dioptre reading glasses (I only need +1!). Spatter from the printer made some dots come up about half a mm across.

So if there's not much difference on a black spot on a white background 1/200 the frame width (36mm) wide , how much will it show on a real picture? I was looking about 25% off centre. Flatness varies, but if you're stacking you get some of that back - not sure how much.
In my case, vibration just about kills the differences.

Having said that I AM the sort of idiot who takes a magnifying glass to a print 2 feet wide

(I wonder if folk would like to see evidence, but I have logistics problems. To make room to eat, the camera has to go under the chair.)

Iainp · Post by **Iainp** » Mon Oct 12, 2009 6:14 am

Thanks NU. I'm now watching about 25 items in ebay!

I see cheap bellows from China for under £30; do you think they would do the job?

I've also revisited a lot of the previous posts on the forums that didn't make much sense to me before, but now I'm starting to learn this "foreign language" it's all starting to come together.

Can I check one thing with you: "A microscope setup restricts you to the very small diameter of the RMS thread."

I thought the Nikon objectives were RMS thread too. Not so?

I had planned to bid on the one Chris identified on ebay (NIKON 349507 M PLAN 10 0.25 210/0) on the assumption that whatever route I went down, I could always screw it into my SP100.
(You can see how I REALLY don't want to let go of the scope

)