Greetings from a butterfly addict

[HiddenWorlds]

Hi all,

I'm here to learn more about microscopes as they relate to the kind of photography I enjoy, and I'm looking forward to reading through some of the topics I've already found. I do focus stacking, and I shoot solid specimens by reflected light - either from LED sources or from photographic strobes, or occasionally mixed light of both types. My setup is rudimentary. I have an old Swift 960 microscope and a slightly newer Boreal trinocular continuous zoom microscope, and I mount my DSLRs on them with adapters. I also shoot on the handheld macro scale, focusing mainly on insects, lichens and plant parts.

I come at my photography from the perspective of an artist, but I see understanding and accepting as much of the science underlying it as we can as being prerequisite to understanding it as art, or as philosophy, for that matter. I've addicted myself to the process of manually focus stacking. I find that while my hands and part of my mind are occupied with it, the rest of my conscious mind starts asking things that interest me. I use the sheer enjoyment I get from doing this stuff to offset the discomfort of accepting grand scale issues, such as aspects of our nature or our climate crisis, about both of which I write when I'm not taking pictures.

My favourite subjects are butterflies. I spend many hours examining them, photographing them, and hiking along the highways to collect more. Our vehicular traffic slaughters many millions of them every year, and wherever butterflies still exist, their bodies are laying along the shoulders of the roads, waiting to be found. It's usually the ants that find them first, but I don't mind the competition. I've decided this is a good, ethical way for me to collect specimens of the species I enjoy living in the adjacent fields. I can't seem to get enough of them, in either context. Their season is so short.

I set up a website this spring, so rather than embedding the photos I'd like to share I'll leave the link here: https://www.hiddenworlds.ca/

I'm currently trying to understand magnification, and I've posted a topic here, just in case anybody seeing this can help.

[microcosmos]

Thanks for the introduction. I got excited when you mentioned manual focus stacking as I enjoy doing that too when I need images with depth of field. It's therapeutic.

When I look through the eyepiece, it's so peaceful inside that circle that it does help me escape from climate change.

Have fun!

[HiddenWorlds]

Thanks for your reply. Your website is wonderful. It might be significant that despite how vastly our experience, resources and talent differ, we both find a similar enjoyment in the physical process of making these kinds of pictures and observations. It's a big part of the draw for me. If the feelings I derive from it ever dry up or become unsatisfying I think I'd just buy an automatic rail system. Do you find a similar state of consciousness when playing music? I've wondered about this, and I frequently listen to music while stacking, but the playing of it isn't something for which I've ever found aptitude.

Just to clarify a point, I'm not trying to escape our climate crisis. I struggled to accept it for a very long time, for more than thirty years. This stuff helped in the end; it was potent enough that I could use it to get through some of the fundamental issues I was stubbornly refusing to accept. I'll pause here before I start rambling about it, but I enjoy discussing this stuff, too.

[microcosmos]

Indeed, for me a large part of the fun of microscopy is in the manual control and looking through the analogue glass of the eyepieces at the real thing rather than a live view on a computer screen, although motorization and digital workflows have lots of advantages for research and I wouldn't mind using them when I need to and if they're available to me.

Music has a different effect for me as I use it to bring myself into worlds other than microscopy. So I can't listen to music while using the microscope as I might accidentally smash the objective into the slide (but I do set the coarse focus knob travel limiter to stop it before they touch)!!!

Yes I understand your point about the climate. For me, beyond being climatically responsible as much as possible on a personal level, I have to leave the rest to people like you who raise awareness on a wider scale and the people who have more power to take bigger actions.

[HiddenWorlds]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. You've prompted me to question myself here, because my first reaction to your last line was to think "But, I'm not trying to raise awareness" on the scale you intended, but I guess I am in an indirect way. The way I see it, our climate crisis is such a problem because we refuse to honestly accept ourselves and many aspects of our environment. We facilitate our dishonesty and denial through our addictions to our innate emotionalism, and we abuse strong emotions when we encounter information we don't want to accept. I see the molecules responsible for our perceptions of feelings as endogenous drugs with such great abuse potential our entire species has succumbed to their abuse. We've formed a very complicated system of rules governing which emotions are appropriate in various contexts, but few of these rules come from a place of self honesty. Rather, most seem designed to perpetuate a fictitious status quo where we all continue to pretend things are better than they are.

I think we'll rapidly become extinct because we have lost ourselves to valuing "feels over reals", and I think our final adaption needs to be to honestly accept what is happening on our individual scales, because if we don't, all of the things we'll try in response to what's coming won't line up with reality, they'll fail, and the suffering of our unintended consequences will be even greater than if we chose to decline more rationally. But, I mean, even the suggestion of declining, rationally or not, is not met rationally by very many people. We refuse to accept that it is beyond our control, even now. Collectively we still think it's good to subject new people and new generations to what's coming. The disconnect is as extreme as the fictions people use to maintain the flow of their habituated feelings. I genuinely believe that most of the awareness we need at this stage is internal. We can't accept our climate crisis honestly until we learn to accept ourselves and our agency more honestly.

I hope this is OK here. I'm aware of how off-topic this stuff is for this forum. It's my intent to explain what I like to write about rather than to pull up a soapbox.