Recently we saw some very detailed micro photos of grape vine leaves
posted here by seemann. He had used nail varnish to make an imprint of the leaf's surface. I was much amazed to see such excellent results, for I had tried this method too in my experimenting years, and had rejected it. If I remember well, hardly any fine detail was captured and it was hard to make photos of the negative imprint. Perhaps seemann's wife uses a better quality of nail varnish than I had acquired for this purpose. Anyway, I have disposed of the clotting bottles a year ago and not being welcome in the shops in these times of covid, I tried superglue. And was perplexed by the first results.
- Equisetym hyemale ssp. hyemale
The method is all too simple: draw a line of glue on a microscope slide, flatten out a fresh stem section in it, clamp it for an hour or so, and then gently pull away the stem. Often a perfect impression remains. Of course, it's appropriately called superglue, so it won't always let go of the stem. My success rate is a little over two out of three. Once the mailman had delivered a fresh bottle of transparent nail varnish I could try alternative ways for sticky cases. Pure nail varnish still didn't dry well and once again it only showed the coarsest of details, as if half molten. Diluted with roughly the same amount of acetone it dries much better, but doesn't come loose since the affinity for horsetail stems is stronger than for microscope slides.
What works quite well is painting the stem with diluted nail varnish and letting it dry. Then glue the varnished stem to the slide and once the glue is hard, gently pry the stem loose in such a way that both the varnish and glue remain on the slide. The softer skinned horsetails yield better results this way while the scouring rushes do well in the former fashion.
I am not certain as to why the results were so much better this time. Factors that seem important are the better control of the hardening, transparent instead of opaque nail varnish, and a much better microscope.
The 3D-renderings were made by feeding the depth map into ImageJ's plug-in
Interactive 3D surface plot and superimposing the stacked image onto that model.
- E. hyemale ssp. affine
- E. ramosissimum
Very interesting.