Fiddling Around with Microphotography

I'm hoping to have a new camera hooked up on my refurbished scope, soon.  And I also look forward to, at some point, having more slides to study.   More about that later.   

 As for now, this blog has languished for a long while.  Recently, though, I have been diving into study of Millepora spp.   And, most recently, into microscopy and photography.

 Today I was messing around in The Gimp.  The following bits result from my fooling around.  

Recently, I've wondered about the distribution of the medusae on the surface of the colony.  We might ask many questions.  A few:

1. Where do the medusae originate in the scheme of things, on a non-reproductive colony?   
2. Where are all the Gastrozoids and Dactylozoids in this shot?  
3. What is the density of Medusae/Ampullae?
4. This eventually leads to a singular question: where, when, and how do medusae first begin to differentiate?

I have also been noticing the patterns on these slides.  Esther Peters seems to have preferentially sliced these sections parallel with the surface.   I hadn't thought of that!  I had thought that cross sections would be more revealing, so that is what I mostly had done.  I was right, but I think Esther was righter.   It takes a tremendous amount of time to work through the number of cross sections that would be required to cover 1cm2.

I was/am right too, because some processes are better revealed in cross sections---albeit they be more laborious to uncover.   For example, one of the biggest questions is this: What is going on at the surface, where the ampullar tissues and the ectodermis connect  SOMETHING is happening to dissolve CaCO3, I assume, to make it possible for the Ampullae to break their way out.

 

Micrographs without Microscopes

Yesterday I set up to photograph a slide with a macro lens on my Canon EOS M50.  It's a pretty good macro lens, the 28mm EF-M macro lens.   It was a laborious process.

 

The plan was to photograph the slide in the highest possible resolution, on a background of glossy photopaper.  Two ikea desk lamps were used to light from both sides (more would be better, or a ring light), to knock out the shaddows; the previous day my results were horrible, with stark shaddows, as the sections were on top of the slide, shadows being thrown through the couple of millimeters of glass.  This was not as bad, but far from perfect.  

Next I will try a scanner, 1200 or 2400 pixels.

Then I edited to "clean up" the images.  I haven't gotten far, but here are some shots:

With edge detection, inverted.

Cleaned up the background.

 

 

 

Edge Detection: are some medusae paired up?