snot, fly, ants along with equipment progress

[manu de hanoi]

Hello
Aquired a scope few months ago and started hacking and experimenting

1) basic setup and live snot (view in hd from 2:20), it's fun to see your own ciliate cells dancing !

2)then started playing with stacking (zerene staker software), but stacking requires a minimal depth of field and I really wanted to use the 40x, below is taken with a 40x with customized very narrow apperture.

3)Kept banging my head with the conundrum between exposition, aperture, depth of field and resolution. Bougth a cheap 10x plan to replace the stock 10x semi plan (great improvement), and found out sometimes you get similar or better results with 10x than with a reduced aperture 40x as shown in this attempt :

4)live insects are more interesting than dead ones as i found out here:

5)lighting contraptions increased in complexity in order to capture live insects, I recommend soldering surface mounted led contraptions near the target, 1 watt very close is like 200 watts at 30 cm :

been trying lately to get to understand the mouth pieces of the ant, but Im not quite there, here's an attempt that is not too bad though:


Been working a lot on laminar illumination with laser and white light without much success so far...Thanks for your comments

[Radazz]

These are really nice!

[75RR]

Like the 'ants eating sugar'
Have you considered slowing the video down?

[coominya]

Those are some nasty greeblies living up your hooter manu, better have the ear nose and throat doctor look into it
Nice conversion on the microscope, and great video with the ants too. If I can put in a request, I'd love to see ants eating a spider. Pull all its 8 legs off first of course. I did that at high school once but without the benefit of a microscope. Ahhh, the things we boys do.

[manu de hanoi]

Like the 'ants eating sugar'
Have you considered slowing the video down?

thanks, please try the "speed" setting under the gear icon on bottom right

I'd love to see ants eating a spider.

I wouldnt know how to do that with the depth of field limitation on the x10 objective. Plus trouble sticking the spider to a coverslip, because ants need to be trapped or the intense illumination scares them away.

[vasselle]

Bonjour
Très bon travail
J'aime beaucoup la dernière vidéo avec les fourmis.
Merci pour le partage
Cordialement seb