Focus Stacked Alyssum Flower Stem

[Sphaerotilus]

I am presently in my first week of evaluating the focus stacking program Helicon Focus and am quite amazed by how excellent it is.

I made this image of a dried out Alyssum flower stem by focus stacking 67 raw images together in Helicon Focus. This went surprisingly quick, given that each raw image was about 75 mb in size. The photos were taken under a Nikon Labophot-2 microscope using a 10x bright field objective. The approx. width of the stem at this point is 0.5 mm.

I'm not sure what the 2 small fibers are near the bottom of the photomicrograph. From their branched shape, I am guessing that they could be fungal filaments.


Focus Stacked Alyssum Stem by Jared Fein, on Flickr

[DonSchaeffer]

Good job!

[tgss]

Very nice job indeed Sphaerotilus. As to the fibres, I have to admit the one with the blue appearance looks synthetic, but maybe not. The other, as you say, may be fungal.
Tom W.

[Sphaerotilus]

When you blow the image up, the blue fiber appears to have a complex structure and the blue colour isn’t uniform. It would be too difficult to try to try to examine it further under higher mag. given its low abundance.

[Sphaerotilus]

Based on new work I have done, I believe that the blue colour seen on the fiber in the image is an artifact arising by the way I am lighting the subject.