Home made blood smear with Wrights Giemsa stain

[Crater Eddie]

Olympus BH-2, Dplan 40x .65NA



Olympus BH-2, Dplan 40x .65NA



Olympus BH-2, Dplan 40x .65NA


Here are a few shots of a blood smear I made on January 4th; Wife's blood stained with Wrights Giemsa stain and mounted with transformer varnish. So far the varnish seems to be a satisfactory mountant. We see various white blood cells in a field of red cells with a few platelets here and there.
This time the AmScope MU300 USB camera is shooting directly through the phototube without the benefit of the .5x reduction lens.
I think I like these shots without the reduction lens. What do you think?

You can compare with shots made with the reduction lens in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2222

CE

[Oliver]

Hello,

and mounted with transformer varnish

what is transformer varnish? Is it the "paint" that holds the coil of a transformer in place? If so, where did you get it and is there any shrinkage when drying? Is it dissolvable in alcohol? I am asking, because I am looking for a cheap, safe and fast drying mounting medium for school use, and Euparal takes too long to dry and others require xylene. And Nail polish shrinks a lot if too liquid.

Needless to say, the pictures are excellent.

Oliver

[75RR]

To my untrained in gore eye, this set is clearer, sharper, bigger (as it should) and shows the 2 densities within the white cell (though not as clearly as in the other images). Have you tried Oblique with this subject? Might be fun.

[rnabholz]

I agree with 75, these do seem to me to be sharper and clearer to my eyes.

Very pleasing result. Nicely done CE

[Crater Eddie]

... what is transformer varnish? Is it the "paint" that holds the coil of a transformer in place?

Oliver, you are right about the transformer varnish. We use it at work by the barrel (we make transformers), so I thought I would test it out for the fun of it... so far it seems to work well as a mountant, at least for blood smear slides. I made the slide 16 days ago, have noticed no shrinkage though I'm not sure how it would manifest in the case of this thin sample. Unfortunately, this varnish is a polyester based resin that uses Xylene, so I suppose it would be unsuitable for your application.

I did try oblique some time ago on the LOMO L-2-2 scope, since it has the oblique condenser, and was disappointed. I'll have to try it again some time. The Olympus scope doesn't seem to have a filter holder under the condenser, so experiments with oblique, DF, UFG, etc will have to wait until I can find or build one. Or until the mood strikes me to work with Boris again. I did notice that the details in the white cells are a little "muddy", I'm not sure that isn't due at least in part to my ham-fisted post processing.

I'm glad you fellows like the images, and I appreciate all comments and suggestions.

CE

[gekko]

Very nice images. I think I would agree: they seem to have better contrast and color.

mounted with transformer varnish

Interesting use of transformer varnish!

[vasselle]

Very nice image
Cordialement seb

[Crater Eddie]

Thank you both! Most kind.
CE