First shots with new camera

[Lilly Begonia]

I got my camera today, still getting used to the software, but I had another look at a fresh blood slide and I want to know what these things are. I don't have my stain for this yet. There are also globs in it I can't identify. I have to say, this camera is very nice.



Here's one of the globs:

[Crater Eddie]

Those USB cameras are nice to use and if you happen to get a good one can produce pretty good images. The software has lots of good features, though sometimes can be a little fiddly to figure out.
At first glance I would say your arrows point to crenated red blood cells. Its hard to tell what the "blob" is without proper staining.
CE

[Lilly Begonia]

Those USB cameras are nice to use and if you happen to get a good one can produce pretty good images. The software has lots of good features, though sometimes can be a little fiddly to figure out.
At first glance I would say your arrows point to crenated red blood cells. Its hard to tell what the "blob" is without proper staining.
CE

I know! I have the stain ordered and on the way, but it's not here yet, so no more blood slides until I get it. Yes, I'm pretty happy with this camera, and seeing through my scope on a 32 in. monitor. You are right though, the software takes some fiddling to work out, and it didn't come with any instructions. Today I'm trying to find new neat things to look at and got some water out of the canal here. It had some really fast little things zooming around in it, some sort of aquatic plant and lots of numerous little chunks of stuff, but nothing as interesting as the little critter I saw before i got my camera. I wish I had that again, but I cleaned the drain I got it from with bleach, so that's gone.

I think I might have found an amoeba today:




What do you think? It's it?

[Crater Eddie]

It's hard to say. Kind of looks like a bubble. You can get rid of the pink tint in your photos by adjusting the white balance in your software. Are you using Toup View? There are some good tutorials for it on YouTube.
CE

[Lilly Begonia]

It's hard to say. Kind of looks like a bubble. You can get rid of the pink tint in your photos by adjusting the white balance in your software. Are you using Toup View? There are some good tutorials for it on YouTube.
CE

My camera came with ToupLite, so that's what I'm using. I'm still very new to this, just a few days into it and exploring as I go. Yeah, it's prolly just a bubble

Right now I'm looking at some lichen I got off a tree outside, some of which I'm hydrating in hopes of finding a water bear.

[einman]

Ahhh.. the elusive tardigrade! Well...at least for me they have been elusive ..but not for long!!!

[KurtM]

You show a blob in your latest image, and amoebas are blobs. If the blob moves on its own and changes shape as it does, it's an amoeba, which makes it difficult to say from a still shot.

Amoebas are fairly small and slow-moving, which, in addition to their transparency, make them easy to overlook. If you're on the hunt for amoebas, I recommend closing down the condenser iris since contrast is more important than resolution in such case, go slowly, and use moderate power - a 16x or 20x objective would be good, assuming 10x oculars, as a compromise between field of view for scanning and magnification for seeing specifics.

Funny you should mention tardigrades, I have literally thousands upon thousands of them on hand at the moment. They came from the mud bed of a brackish water tidal flat, which lay exposed due to extra low winter tides here on the upper Texas gulf coast.

Ironically, I normally find "water bears" in dry (moss) samples, that I soak in a petri dish of DIW (dionized water, or in my case, grocery store distilled water).