As I don't think I've posted any pictures of this rig so far, we'll start off with the business end, without tube or arch.
In this picture you can see the lens end of the bellows at the bottom of the picture, and my prior micromanipulator subject holder top right. I removed this from it's base and fixed it (via a thin piece of wood so the control knobs clear the base) to the base. It is at 90 degrees to it's normal position so that I can use the fine (normally vertical) control for focus stacking...
The specimen is usually held either on a pin or pinched in a piece of cardboard which is mounted in the crocodile clip you can see...
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Next here's a shot of my tube. Its some sort of packaging material, it's sort of semi-opaque, variable, foamy stuff, 0.5 - 1mm thick or thereabouts...
I just got a square of this, used blue-tac to stick one side to the opposite side to form a tube. I then cut a hole in the side for the specimen to be inserted, or rather the tube placed around the specimen.
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Next here's the tube in place (no specimen in this shot)
The white reflector (which is just cardboard, slightly curved) underneath, which the tube is resting on is just on top of a pile of stuff which I have to vary slighly depending on how the subject is mounted, which can be a bit fiddly!
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That was all a bit fiddly so the tube evolved into an arch. Here is the piece I cut out of the packing material...
The cutout on the left is to go around the stick in which the crocodile clip is mounted... Here it is in place.
This seems to work as well as the tube and is a lot easier to put in place without disturbing the specimen and without having to adjust things to put it in place.
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So any thoughts on the diffusion? I'm quite happy with the output I'm getting from it, any contrast issues I think are down to Tufuse's tendency to increase contrast and my attempt to stop this by processing my RAW originals into soft looking TIFFs for tufuse to use!
I know Rik and Charlie both use Ping pong balls, and tissue paper, which I reckon would be similar to this material I'm using in terms of diffusion, but I suspect my material is probably easier to use, I can wedge it in place and it stays put if someone wafts past etc... What other solutions have you lot come up with?
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Finally as I was taking these pictures I couldn't resist a sneak preview of my next rig, probably not on it's ultimate base, and hardly any of it is actually bolted together yet! The bellows will mount on the big black lump bottom right of the pic, the specimen will mount on the small blue ball head on the nice shiny micromanipulator in the middle, and backdrops may be held on the manipulator at the rear, but that's still undecided!
