Yet another beginner...sorry

A forum to ask questions, post setups, and generally discuss anything having to do with photomacrography and photomicroscopy.

Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau

Biologyben
Posts: 33
Joined: Mon Sep 25, 2006 10:23 pm
Contact:

Yet another beginner...sorry

Post by Biologyben »

I'm in the process of building a cheap photomicrography set up similar to Mr. Krebs fabulous example and have a few questions.

So far i have:

1.5"x2'x2' of structured board for the base
An old (solid) drill press column with adjustable mount for bellows
A canon FL bellows unit (a 3 track unit - front, rear, and focusing rails)
A canon fd-eos adapter (glued fd rear lens cap to EOS body cap)
A canon A2 and Rebel X 35mm film (gasp!) cameras
Combine ZM software

So far I've only paid $5 for the caps to make the fd-eos adapter! Everything else was from things i had laying around.

Noticeably missing is the microscope, flash, and a digital camera. I think i have a source for a canon 20d, and as I'm at a university, microscopes are plentiful.

Questions are as follows. I have access to several older trinocular scopes with various American Optics objectives, mostly infinity corrected apochromats, and binocular scopes (Leica CM-E) with PLAN (Leica e2 160mm tube length) objectives. Any AO lenses I should be on the look out for? Do non PLAN lenses matter if stacking? (I have not found any photo eyepieces, or trinocular leica heads, unfortunately)

The 20d mount to sensor distance should be identical to an A2 mount to film plane distance. Could I adjust for parfocal with the digital, switch bodies and take film pictures without adjustments (no different than mounting the same lens on different camera's, right?) This could be very handy, but there is the larger size of the negative to keep in mind.

Any advice for metering for print or slide film since I can't chimp with film cameras like i would with digital?

I'm going to make my first attempts without additional lighting while I play with the system using mounted slides. The flashes I do have (Vivitar & Sunpak) cannot be manually adjusted, so are probably fairly useless in this application, correct?

Of course, any other advice you may have would be great!

Charles Krebs
Posts: 5865
Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2006 8:02 pm
Location: Issaquah, WA USA
Contact:

Post by Charles Krebs »

Ben,

I would take a good look at the American Optical gear you say is available. They are generally very good optically, and being "infinity-corrected" you will not need to be concerned with any additional chromatic corrections in the eyepieces. I am not too familiar with these microscopes, but I think the tube on the trinocular head is readily removable. It might even be possible to do "direct projection" from the objective right into the camera body if you can get the camera body close enough. If this were possible you would probably need to crop the image in a photo-editing program to eliminate some vignetting... but you avoid the issue of "relay-optics" completely.

"Plan" objectives would be less "necessary" if you intended to combine a Z-stack of images into a single photo. But since there are many times you may not be able to do this I would first see if plan objectives were available. You should realize that some non-plan objectives were really not too bad in this regard until you got closer to the edge of the field. So a great deal will also depend on how much of the viewed field is going to be recorded. If you are recording just a strong "crop" from the center of the viewed field, you may not see any difference (in terms of field flatness) between plan and non-plan objectives.

In theory, once you have accurately positioned your digital Canon EOS, you should be able to replace it with the film EOS camera and keep the same focus. Being a little obsessive about this (and because the depth-of-focus can be so small in photomicrography) I would want to do some careful testing before I relied on this to be the case. I always like to test focus with the same body I will be using to take the pictures.

Charlie

Biologyben
Posts: 33
Joined: Mon Sep 25, 2006 10:23 pm
Contact:

Post by Biologyben »

The scope in particular is a AO 1-60, and yes, the triocular head is very easy to remove. I'll play with this option some.

I've previously used this old scope with an old camera using a PVC adapter, and took a picture of a absolutely flat onion root tip that showed very strong curvature of the field, and i wasn't able to move the camera away from the scope to expand the image circle, so i dropped the idea. I used the setup yesterday on some other slides and strongly cropped the center to eliminate the very blurry edges. I'll post some pics when they're developed. (if they come out)

I'm excited. I'll be looking for those plan-achro's tho.

More questions when the pics come back I'm sure.

Danny
Posts: 725
Joined: Fri Feb 02, 2007 11:07 pm
Location: New Zealand

Post by Danny »

Sorry I should have mentioned this before now. Check out this post and feel free to ask the same question in this thread. Its interesting and seems to be getting more comments

http://photomacrography.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1965

Danny.
Worry about the image that comes out of the box, rather than the box itself.

Post Reply Previous topicNext topic