Vorticella (as seen through a Sony A9)

[hkv]

I have had the opportunity to evaluate the Sony Alpha A9 for microscopy use. The Sony A9 mainly target sports photography which in many aspects are similar to microscopy when chasing a subject to be in focus and keeping it inside the frame. I tried the burst mode with 20fps and captured a moving Vorticella. 20fps is in RAW, full resolution, 24 mega pixel each. Really insane speed compared to my old Canon 6D. All but one are single exposures and no stacks. In one occasion, the Vorticella moved through the focus planes and the camera managed to capture it as it glided through the Z-axis. This is the first time I have shot a focus stack where the subject handles the focus adjustments by itself without me moving the objective (!).

I have also included a link to a movie showing the actual capture bursts in action.

https://youtu.be/BGPhCnaCRtY


Here are a selection of the captured images. The last image is a stack of 7 images.


Vorticella


Vorticella


Vorticella

Vorticella


Vorticella

[billben74]

Very nice results with a nice new piece of kit.
It clearly has a lot applications (the camera I mean).
Look forward to seeing them!

[zzffnn]

Hakan,

I like your photos and video demo. The flashing in the first 24 seconds of that video hurts my eyes though.

Steve Beats showed a similar burst shooting and stacking, over at photomacrography, a while ago, with his A9. That model has a larger than usual buffer, which really helps with burst shooting.