MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

This is indeed a composite shot, made from four focus-stacked photos stitched together (one for each quadrant, each composed of a stack of around 60 photos). The green color is completely natural, and is a characteristic of many genera in the family (often called metallic sweat bees).

Decent shot (I think) of a bee, Agapostemon texanus.

I collected this little chalcid while doing sweeps of the lawn and shrubs in my backyard.

Conura albifrons.

Those look really good! What are you using for lighting?

Thanks for the help! I didn't do a complete disassembly, but i was able to add a bit of oil to the focus block sliding bearings and cleaned up a bit of gunk and grit in the gearbox and coarse/fine focus gearing. I don't know what I did to fix it, but the previously non-functional fine focus (it was ...

Hi all, I recently acquired a bare-bones Olympus BHM that could use some cleanup and re-greasing, but I can't figure out how to start taking it apart. There seem to be plenty of manuals for the BH-2 series, but nothing applicable for an older BHM (they all start with "remove the back panel", which t...

I've been afraid to ask them; I suspect the black one resents that I removed part of it with a hacksaw.

So, I purchased a couple of the beat-up B&L scopes, and have incorporated one of them into my setup (it's the black one in the photo). It works pretty well overall, but I did have to flip my "real" scope around 180 degrees to fit the butchered one in the working space; this necessitated using the ex...

Great, thanks so much for the info!

Does anyone happen to know what brand/model these scopes might be? They're available very cheaply for parts from a local university surplus, but I don't want to pull the trigger if they're known to be actual junk.

Thanks!

Thanks for all the advice! It's still pretty overwhelming, but now I have a much broader range of brands/models to look for. One thing I've noticed is that the turret of most models would have to be removed (probably via hacksaw) as they'd get in the way, which doesn't sound like much fun. I suppose...

I'm thinking about picking up an old/used scope to butcher for the stage/stand/focus block (to place under my scope/camera setup for focus stacking and such), but ebay is a bit daunting... Any recommendations for brands/models I should look for? Olympus and Nikon seem to be popular, but all the hard...

Hi everyone, I've been playing around with focus stacking lately, but have been having trouble with vibration/movement since I'm changing the focus manually. As far as I can tell the main culprit is the pillar stand: there's a bit of "flex" at the point where the pillar attaches to the base, so ther...

It was! I think the dome is almost exactly what I need for small to medium-small specimens... The next step is focusing hardware for stacking that doesn't suck (using the scope to focus introduces WAY too much movement, and my cheap lab lifter is pretty rough).

A tumbling flower beetle, at 45x magnification.

Scope: AmScope Surface Inspection stereo zoom 3.5-90X with trinocular port Camera: AmScope MU1403 (14 megapixel USB3) Software: AmScope-branded ToupView for capture and Microsoft ICE for stitching My lighting setup (if I'm not using the cheap overhead ring light) is a DIY diffusion dome: dismantled ...

I've been slowly digitizing my collection (using iPhone photos mostly), and was working on bees when I got my equipment. Plus, this specimen is a good test subject: areas of high and low contrast, vivid colors, lots of hair, metallic surfaces and reflections...

Playing around with my new scope and camera... It's a male sweat bee ( Agapostemon ) at 20x magnification, made up of five focus-stacked images stitched together (you can easily see the stitching artifacts in the background). It would probably be a bit clearer if my hands and scope weren't as shaky ...