I finally received some Ikea Janso lights a couple of days ago and thought I would finally have my setup in pretty good shape. Pretty disappointed with those lights.
So I'm here to ask for some advice from all you gurus on what some of my options are.
First, let me show you what my setup looks like and what I have tried so far.
Moveable Stage
I purchased an old Bausch and Lomb compound microscope and hacksawed off the head. This gives me a stage which I can move left and right using the knobs for the microscope stage and I can move it up and down in as small as 1 micron increments using the fine focus. That part works pretty nice since I previously was using the focus knob on my microscope camera.
I built the shelf for it to attach to the table and hang a bit below it so that my microscope can swing over the top.
I also cut apart an old CD case and screwed that down in place of the metal slide holder so that it moves forward/back (left/right if the microscope were facing you).
And stealing some ideas on this forum for a specimen holder made from a ball, I first tried filling a ping pong ball with drywall paste but didn't really like that. So I bought a couple of steel balls off Amazon for $8 and using a small magnet to hold the clip in place covered it with epoxy. Works nice.
Microscope
As you can see it's similar to an AmScope stereo microscope with a camera mounted on top.
Ring Light
I have a ring light that came with the microscope with a dimming switch. Works nicely but has a lot of glare and produces "rings of light" in the reflections. I tried covering the ring with some tissue paper and also with an opaque plastic. Ok, but not great.
Battery Powered LED Light
On the right hand side of the microscope you can see a black gooseneck LED lamp with a magnetic base. Produces a fair amount of light and when covered with a couple of layers of tissue paper is able to cut down on a lot of the reflection. The problem with it is that it has two brightness levels. I am assuming it is using PWM to do this because on the low brightness setting when I take a series of pictures I will capture different light levels. And even on the high brightness setting it will sometimes start flickering after being on for a while.
DIY LED Strip Light Ring
I had some strip light LEDs laying around from some previous project in the past and decided to try and make a ring out of it so that I could place it close to the specimen. I basically taped the strip into a ring and soldered on a couple of wires and hooked them up to the power supply you can see in the left of the picture above. I then cut off the top of a plastic cup and inserted that into the ring to diffuse the light.
This actually worked pretty good. You can see the picture of the spider on the monitor in one of the earlier pictures. Very flimsy since I didn't spend any time trying to make something nice.
Ikea Janso Lights
I've got these three lights covered with pieces of a ping pong ball and positioned fairly close to the specimen. Doesn't look too bad when looking through the lenses, but when viewed with the camera (and projected on the screen) it is very dim and very red.
SUGGESTIONS ?
Any suggestions would be very welcome.
- Some other type of lights that you like?
- Should I build my own lights? If so, suggested types? (Please note that I don't want to spend hundreds on lights)
- Why are the Janso lights so popular with you guys? Do you use them for something other than main lighting?