Re: Advice for a microscope for photog. purpose?

[Andre Langevin]

Thanks Don. I'm a true beginner, so I should go on the WEB trying to get some basic instruction about microscopes, lighting etc.

First of all what are your specimens going to be like.
Sections of plants?
Small solid objects? Seeds, shells, tiny animals, insects,

Possibly all those.

pollen grains (these are great, often having beautiful sculptured detail on
the surface)

Interesting... Very variable in size I guess.

If you want to take pictures of small solid objects, say between 0,1 mm and
10 mm in size a stereo microscope would be suitable. The barrels of these
instruments have a diameter of 33 mm - Leitz, Zeiss, Wild, Reichert,

Olympus, Nikon and such, are all the same.

Using a stereo microscope is much easier, you can use it to look at anything that will fit on the stage, or not if you have the right support. Limited transmission is also possible.

Transmission means light passing through the specimen?

But remember this - at final magnifications - more than about 5X you will have hardly any depth of field. There are ways around this problem, but all are very complicated and expensive.

I'll live with litle depth of field...

A Wild M1,a simple student instrument will give a range of magnifications from about 5X to 80X and be the most suitable for a start.

You'd need good lights, at least two and a couple of reflectors perhaps.

Any web site showing / explaining different products and settings, or names of eBay items?

Most labs use halogen lamps
with fibre optic light guides these days - expensive things. But tell us
what you have in mind. If you don't know, as I didn't when I first started
this at 15, it can be frustrating.

I can do macro with bellows up to about 5x, so next step is going from 5x up. I don't need to go very far after that. I'd like to be able to show parts of plants, fibres' structure: wood, paper (with and without ink).

for a few hundred you might
get a nice instrument on eBay - a Wild or Leitz with a couple of sets of
eyepieces and a magnification range of 5X to 250X.

So this is a price without objectives?  (I already have Mplan 5x and 10x.)

Remember this though: the results will always be a bit disappointing. What
you see with two eyes is always more impressive than a picture taken through
one of the tubes.

Because it is not stereo anymore... So I'll close one eye to loose the stereoscopic vision, a thing I often do while looking for a photograph.

Andre
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