MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

I am a man who never had any skill with real tools. All my life I made things out of paper clips, cardboard, and aluminum foil. I'm still doing that. I wanted to add substage light to my stereo microscope to see what kind of images I might produce. I wanted the same thing for my digital scopes (which I used to take stereo microscope scale photos).

The stereo microscope has empty space under the stage covered by plastic disks. I made a transparent plastic disk out of recycled plastic and put a pack of reflective aluminum foil under the stage so the top stage light would reflect off of the foil. That generates considerable substage light. The source is out of focus. Now I'm just trying to evaluate if this move has any benefit.

I covered the base of my digital microscope with aluminum foil. This reflects the light from the top stage LED in the microscope. So far I do think the light background does improve the image--generating interference lines around the boundaries of what I am looking at, making edges and hair or silhouettes of edges sharper.

Please humor me!

can you post a picture ?

I odn't have a way of photographing through the stereo microscope. These were taken with with digital microscope. Images 1 and 2 are of a transparent object. Images 3 and 4 are of an opaque object. I have to move the slide to adjust my neutral density filter.

i use a piece of white paper under some of my subjects. it can be illuminated from under and above and it does NOT take much light
tinfoil adds too much and really takes away from what you want to view.... . and clean your slides!
post a picture of the microscope and setup you have

Good advice. This was a permanent mount I made when I first burst on the microscope scene. The slide isn't so much dirty as the mounting medium was a more than a bit overdone. I don't make file slides any more.