Diatoms stereo

Images taken in a controlled environment or with a posed subject. All subject types.

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Beatsy
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Diatoms stereo

Post by Beatsy »

Despite using every last diatom from an old keeper slide, I still have a pile of them left :P (I'll fetch my coat...)
Image

RDolz
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Post by RDolz »

Steve,

It is an impressive set, and the 3D vision is spectacular. It allows us to visualize the morphology of these algae in a totally illustrative way. Congratulations.

Congratulations.=D>
Ramón Dolz

Smokedaddy
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Post by Smokedaddy »

Impressive as always. Very interesting to me because I've been experimenting making landscape stereo pairs for a couple of weeks now. It never entered my mind to generate one with a microscope (meaning that TYPE of Diatom arrangement).
Last edited by Smokedaddy on Thu May 14, 2020 11:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

Saul
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Post by Saul »

Very impressive stereo ! What software was used for stacking & stereo ?
Saul
μ-stuff

Beatsy
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Post by Beatsy »

Saul wrote:Very impressive stereo ! What software was used for stacking & stereo ?
The incomparable Zerene Stacker, of course. Accept no substitutes!
(either Paypal or cash will be fine Rik... :P :D )

Sumguy01
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Post by Sumguy01 »

:smt038 Very very nice.
Thanks for sharing.

Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

Very beautiful and three-dimensional, even just the single images.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

The stereo is remarkably free of streaky artifacts. I'm not even seeing any glitches that are typical of retouched stereo.

Is this entirely due to carefully apodized illumination, or is there some other magic?

--Rik

Beatsy
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Post by Beatsy »

rjlittlefield wrote:The stereo is remarkably free of streaky artifacts. I'm not even seeing any glitches that are typical of retouched stereo.

Is this entirely due to carefully apodized illumination, or is there some other magic?

--Rik
There's no magic I'm aware of Rik. Diffuse lights shining on one side of a ping pong ball containing the scene on a glass bead. The ball bounces fill light around inside, but the back half is blacked out. Specimens are arranged to avoid distance detail being overlapped by thin foreground details. Long deep edges are avoided too. The smallest diatom in the middle fell down when I activated the adhesive - it was stood up and covered the highlight lower-middle which avoided the haze. Hey ho - next one will be better.

Oh, I turned off scaling when stacking and step size was a micron for capture (20x mitty onto A7r2 sensor at 13.5x - think it's 4.5 micron pixels).

Olympusman
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Diatoms in stereo

Post by Olympusman »

Crazy beautiful stuff, Beatsy.

Mike
Michael Reese Much FRMS EMS Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Beatsy wrote:Diffuse lights shining on one side of a ping pong ball containing the scene on a glass bead.
Thanks for the additional details.

To explain more fully, "carefully apodized" (as I've used it here) just means that the illumination, as seen by the subject, grades smoothly from maximum brightness to none at all. That's important because it causes smooth edges on OOF blurs also, which minimizes their contribution to things like streaky highlights. If the illumination has a hard edge for any reason, then the OOF blurs have hard edges also, and that makes life a lot harder for stacking software.

Diffuse illumination with soft edges is what's critical for doing this sort of work.

--Rik

Sym P. le
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Post by Sym P. le »

So the large round one (upper left) is actually bowl shaped, not flat. That kind of detail is not well conveyed in typical 2D microscopic photography. Cool!

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