Micrsoscope photography: WARNING large pictures

[SiBurning]

any pictures of Super Iridium or Perma-Sharp (turkish) planned?

Have the SI. Are the perma-sharp the 7 o'clock greens?
I'll pull those 2 out next time around.

Here's my stock (taken months ago, so some have been used)
They'll all get photographed eventually.

10 Astra Superior Stainless
1 Astra Superior Platinum (Platinum plated, Made in Russia)
5 Bic Chrome Platinum (Chrome Platinum plated, Made in Greece)
10 Croma Diamant
20 Crystal (Platinum Chrome plated, Made in Israel)
5 Derby Extra (horizontal packaging)
10 Dorco Stainless New Platinum ST-300 (stainless steel with a platinum coating, Made in Korea)
200 Feather (Platinum coated)
5 Gillette 7 o'clock Permasharp Stainless green
10 Gillette 7 o'clock SharpEdge yellow (stainless steel, Made in Russia)
7 Gillette 7 o'clock (Indian 7s)
2 Gillette Super Stainless
10 Gillette Super Thin
4 Gillette Blue Blade
10 Goldendeers
10 Iridium Super
10 Kai
10 Lords Shogun
13 Merkur Super Platinum (platinum coating, Made in Germany)
10 Personna Platinum (aka. IP) ("Platinum Chrome" coating, Made in Israel)
5 7 a.m. platinum hi stainless
5 Shark Super Chrome
5 Shark Super Stainless
5 Sharp (Swedish steel. Made in Bangladesh)
10 Vidyut Super-Max Platinum
11 Wilkinson Sword (Made in Germany)
5 Wilkinson Sword (Made in India)

50 Feather Professional
30 Feather Professional Super

30 Treet
30 Pal
5 Gem Blue Star

 

[aimsport]

Have the SI. Are the perma-sharp the 7 o'clock greens?
I'll pull those 2 out next time around.

Wow. thanks so much for doing this! The perma-sharps are not the Gillette permasharps, they're the russian made cardboard boxed blades: http://www.shaving.ie/products/Perma-Sharp-Super-DE-Blades-for-Safety-Razors.html

I ripped through my sampler of the Perma-sharp supers. PM me and I'll mail you a couple when my supply is replenished.

 

[SiBurning]

No scale. The 3 smaller images were resized, resampled, and sharpened, but there's minimal loss of detail except for the first which is also included untouched (but cropped).

entire edge

same image, cropped, but not resized (for better detail)

stack -- for better depth

focus on the edge

 

[liolo]

Wow !! thank you SiBurning for all these images. There must have been so much time involved in the making of these images, and it shows.

I have a question. When you say stacking, what does it mean ? Is it that you use multiple images with the focus made on different area to create an image which is entirely focused ?

 

[Seraphim]

I'm a big fan of scope pics of razor edges. I don't know how I missed this thread!

Your scope has great resolution, and the through the objective lighting is the most consistant way of illuminating a sample.

Where did you get the scope? And was it expensive? Olympus makes nice stuff.

 

[SiBurning]

Wow !! thank you SiBurning for all these images. There must have been so much time involved in the making of these images, and it shows.

I have a question. When you say stacking, what does it mean ? Is it that you use multiple images with the focus made on different area to create an image which is entirely focused ?

You got it. You move the stage up so that a different part (height) is in focus and take another picture. There's software that stitches them together. People are taking macro pictures of flies made up of 200 shots and they look amazing.

I'm a big fan of scope pics of razor edges. I don't know how I missed this thread!

Your scope has great resolution, and the through the objective lighting is the most consistant way of illuminating a sample.

Where did you get the scope? And was it expensive? Olympus makes nice stuff.

Bought them all on ebay. Did I say all? There's 12 with a 13th on the way. Quality isn't cheap. Figure $1-2000 for what I'm using here, plus extra filters, lights, other lenses, etc. I stopped paying attention to the cost long ago--it's distressing, though definitely cheaper than motorcycles. I'm still using old style 160mm finite optics, but the newer infinity corrected optics tend to be better, and at least twice the price to start with. That upgrade would easily run $4-6000 to replace what I have with the better optics. I'm actually leaning in the DIY direction instead. It won't be all that much cheaper--good glass is easily half the total cost--but it would be made of more standard scientific optical parts, so it would be a very flexible system.

I'm surprised, too, that you missed this thread. I follow all the microscope threads, and have seen yours. Very nice work. In fact, one of your posts inspired me to find ways to do this on the cheap. Your tube scope intrigued me, so I bought an old tube and screwed my Olympus glass on it and it seems to work. The next step is to mount it--the thing itself has a gear to move it up and down along the mount and focus on the object. If that works, well... I do believe your tube can take most manufacturers objectives and eyepieces, as long as it's all for a standard 160mm tube. (Or whatever size, but 160 is fairly standard, and so are the screws.) I doubt they can handle a 100x lens, and even a 40x is sketchy--you need a very fine focus with those objectives, as well as a better lighting system. But there are ways around it.

Additional projects I'm hoping to get around to are (1) to find cheap ways to photograph through these tubes, maybe comparing some USB and cheap camera options, and (2) to figure out how to add a flexible epi light system with darkfield capability. The hard part about taking photographs is that with very few exceptions you need an eyepiece (or photographic projection lens--same basic thing) to correct color and some other geometric aberrations. Just plugging a usb microscope camera into the tube will give distorted pictures with color fringing and other anomalies, as well as things like fish vision. Then again, many of these pictures were taken just that way.

I'm also fixing up an old Olympus N that has an epi illuminator and darkfield. It was (relatively) cheap, but they're very hard to find, so I doubt I'll be able to make more than one B&Ber happy.

Couple of my latest toys...

 

[Konrad]

This fascinating thread deserves a bump. Wonderful microscopy here.

 

[SiBurning]

Since it's been bumped...

The new rig's not quite working well. Focus is off a bit, but the real problems are stability and depth of field. Need to attach a bellow with a stop and mount the camera directly. For photos, it's actually worse than the other rig, even though the nikon microscope optics and the canon camera are better. Here's a picture of the rig, and a picture from the rig.

 

[alex2363]

Steve thank you for your dedication and hard work, i have always admired your work ethic energy ever since i met you back in the Chat room days ( I kinda miss chatroom)

 

[scottish steve]

i can't see them. they've been blocked!

 

[SiBurning]

Wow. thanks so much for doing this! The perma-sharps are not the Gillette permasharps, they're the russian made cardboard boxed blades: http://www.shaving.ie/products/Perma-Sharp-Super-DE-Blades-for-Safety-Razors.html

I ripped through my sampler of the Perma-sharp supers. PM me and I'll mail you a couple when my supply is replenished.

Sorry it took so long...

Here's the Perma Sharp Super in a gold & red pack made in Russia.

The first four are on the nikon. The blade is tilted (on the goniometer pictured in a previous post) so the (roughly 0.5mm) edge lies flat, putting more of it in focus. The 4th picture uses a higher magnification objective, with its narrower depth of focus, so much of the depth is gone. These are taken with a projection lens focusing the image directly onto the Canon T3i camera's focal plane--i.e. without a lens attached. See the picture above for the setup.

The last picture is on the Olympus. There's no space for the goniometer under the DIC objectives, so the blade lies flat. This was taken using the 18-135 kit zoom lens mounted above the microscope's projection lens.

 

[jwilock]

Great pics!

 

[SiBurning]

i can't see them. they've been blocked!

Sorry about that. They're probably blocked in many countries outside the USA. I've also bumped into the limit for a free account.

I'll find out about loading them into a gallery here on B&B. Trouble is, this thread still won't be visible. Will try to figure out how to handle this.

 

[alex2363]

I appreciate this thread SI, are you going to finish doing the rest of your blades?

 

[SiBurning]

The plan was to upgrade my equipment and get a repeatable setup where I can set up the blades consistently, and use a stepper motor system to get depth by stitching multiple pictures together. That sort of requires building a microscope platform--something like a macro system. To date, I've tested some Nikon optics, got the Canon camera that has the no vibration options (mirror and shutter lock up), played around with a macro system, and picked up a few contraptions to create a kind of universal stage. Unfortunately, I was interrupted by other financial commitments, but that's mostly behind me. Hopefully, I'll be able to get back on track soon. The dream goal would be to do a shot of every blade in the wiki, possibly multiple views. There are plans beyond that which would be piecemeal like this thread.

For now, I'd rather not continue unless until I can easily replicate the setup. Aside from that, any time I make some progress, either in lighting, optics, or technique, I'd show it off. So that's the near term situation. Maybe within a year or two I can get it all together and move on to some other stuff. But it doesn't make sense to spend hours doing one blade when I can't repeat the results in a way that's easily compared with the next blade.

If only I had access to an electron microscope, spectrometer, etc., but no way am I going back to school.

 

[AllenG]

Google: reverse lens macro photography
One way to get really close for little money is to use a reverse lens set-up.

 

[AjaxLepinski]

Totally awesome photos! I see an exhibition at MOMA in your future! Maybe we can take up a collection for the electron microscope. )

 

[Sawblade]

About 20 minutes ago, I thought I was doing something new by sticking a backwards 50f1.4 on the front of a 105f2.8 macro. I see I was wrong.

The feather was used for 4 days, and the astra for 5 or 6.

Macro alone at 1:1

Backwards lens on front

100% Crop of previous

 

[AjaxLepinski]

Second photo in post 63 is now on my desktop! Third photo in 78 is saved for desktop rotation! Great pics guys!!!

 

[Argonaut]

I think it would be cool to see the ends of the various grades of badger hair magnified.