Dave, Perhaps your shells were too worn. My FW shells were from very fresh, some alive, specimens. My text says the shells are composed of a low-magnesium calcite exoskeleton (carapace) with an outer covering, cuticle, of chitin. My guess is that it is the chitin that 'responds' to polarized light. ...

I used this objective to photograph the shell of a Ostracod, last image: http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=43360 The image was poor. Thinking that maybe the poor result was more the nature of the subject than the quality of the lens. The shell was strongly convex. Used the s...

Excellent image; it's a Chironomid (midge)

I photographed part of the shell with a Nikon 60x ELWD MPlan objective; NA 0.70
Rather poor image quality; not an improvement of the actual pixels from the 20x.

This subject:
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=43360

would fit here

micro_pix showed images of Ostracod shells from a marine environment. The shells appear to have many large pores: http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=43258&sid=2ac28e4040ae51f0d3444f0a7f41a289 I have shown images of entire animals here: http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/vi...

Excellent

In another post you mentioned testing your polarization setup.
A copepod such as this one of yours is a great test for polarization.
See:
https://www.microbehunter.com/microscop ... id#p101006

When it is an Ostracod! These 2-shelled Crustacea, also known as seed-shrimps , were common in a recent FW sample. They range in size, the largest in this sample is 0.60 mm long. Under polarized light the shell can show several different colours. Olympus BH2/BHS, SPlan 10x + 1.25x intermediate tube ...

Yes, I believe it is a full lambda plat'; labeled 530 nm.
By rotating the polarizer I can get various colour backgrounds; the setting that gives the awful purple colour also gives the best definition of the internal musculature.

Thanks again. I worked on the Zerene stacked image and got a better image than my original post. However, it was still slightly inferior to your adjusted image. Had most trouble with removing the purple around the springtail's rear end and furculum, desaturation left me with dark pixels between the ...

Thanks Lou. Not only did you vastly improve the background but also the musculature became clearer.
As an extra bonus it shows that high NA condensers can be used with low NA objectives, if one is competent in post-processing.

The uneven-lighted background is a result of me using the wrong condenser, i.e., their BH2-NC (not recommended for low NA objectives). The Olympus 4x D Plan has a NA of 0.10 and is meant to be used with their Ultra Low Condenser (ULC), which I have. The ULC gave a very evenly-illuminated background ...

extracted this small, body length 1.0 mm, Collembola from moss that had just been exposed below melting snow. In normal light seen as a small off-white beastie, polarized light shows the internal musculature - red, blue, yellow. Note the large yellow dorsal muscle at the rear end which pulls the fur...

A further, final, comment on hand sectioning plant material; (originally posted on MicrobeHunter). I have been trying several techniques to get cross-sections of plant stems including 'hand' cutting with the double razor blade, using a hand microtome fitted to a bench with the plant held by a foam p...