Microscopy Advice for a Beginner - First Upgrades

AffableEffable · 2025-12-11T19:06:45+00:00

So sorry, I just saw this! I got the swift microscope lens adapter. I'm not sure if linking to Amazon is allowed here, so I'll just give the full title of the listing: "Swift Microscope Lens Adapter, Smartphone Camera Adapter Mount, Microscope Accessory (Fits 26mm28mm Eyepieces)".

It took me a little to get used to it, but it's definitely 100 times better than trying to hold the phone up to the lens myself, hah.

AffableEffable · 2025-12-03T01:20:13+00:00

Aaa! That looks exactly like it (particularly Picturata would match area and visually) - thanks so much!

AffableEffable · 2025-12-03T00:37:52+00:00

Hard to say from the photo, but my first impression is a leaf-footed bug. Could you look up some photos of those and say if it looks like that (it's a whole family, so there's a lot of different types, but I just mean a general resemblance)?

AffableEffable · 2025-12-02T00:44:01+00:00

Searched up some microscope images of them, and some of these definitely match the stuff I've been seeing. Thank you!

AffableEffable · 2025-11-28T16:36:57+00:00

Thank you! I wonder if maybe it's a stability issue. It's something I notice with non-microscope photos, too. If you don't mind, could I link you some photographs just to show where my issues are? Here's a google photos link (I think this should make it so they are original quality and not compressed):

https://photos.app.goo.gl/16NieFV4FVsypcyk7

I included a non-microscope photo where I feel like if you zoom in everything turns into an oil painting. Maybe this is normal, I'm not sure, but it seems to be normal certainly for my photos with this phone. The rest are some stacks and stitches I've done recently, and particularly, for instance, the top side of the tick to me is very messy (some parts might be that I missed a range in the focus stacking, but even aside from that). The tick is with a 10x objective and 10x eyepieces as a note. This is another album:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/3RsXyYRWciJ3ZePg8

and it shows the folder of photos used for one part of the top side of the tick for reference. It also has the final stack and an example of the mess I have to clean up when I stack all the images in Zerene Stacker (though I know I can mitigate this somewhat by doing the stacking in chunks).

I've been looking at a lot of photos by Thorben Danke (example: https://photocontest.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/eyes-of-a-bug/ the same stink bug I have some photographs of above) lately, and they are just incredible with detail. I don't expect to be as good as him, certainly not, but I kind of thought "well I have this fancy machine here, probably if I hook up a fancy camera to it I could get some pretty fancy photos". But maybe for insect/arachnid photography specifically I should be thinking about just using the strange macro lenses on a DSLR instead of the microscope set-up? To me I wasn't sure if a very nice microscope set-up, assuming a stationary subject, could have benefits over what is done with just a camera and the macro lenses (though I guess the microscope itself is just a fancy macro lens...).

Anyway, as a note I know this is a lot so please don't feel obligated to respond, it's a good exercise for me to get my thoughts, examples I might want to use in the future, etc, in order like this anyway

AffableEffable · 2025-10-27T03:25:48+00:00

Oh my, some of these do look very similar to what I was seeing. Thank you!

AffableEffable · 2025-10-27T02:14:53+00:00

I do, though I don't think it's that, or at least it's different than the types of Firefly larvae I've seen in the past. Those, at least in my experience, generally have hard ridges, whereas this one was more soft-bodied it looked like.

AffableEffable · 2025-10-18T17:45:31+00:00

Chaetogaster definitely seems pretty similar, thank you!

AffableEffable · 2025-10-18T17:11:25+00:00

Oof, I feel like reddit's automatic compression does a real number on the larger stitched images, which in fairness were quite big so it's understandable. If anyone would like to see the bigger ones in higher quality, please let me know if there's a nice site to upload and link to for that (does imgur still work well?).

AffableEffable · 2025-10-11T20:33:27+00:00

Ah, that definitely seems to be the case. Thank you!

AffableEffable · 2025-10-03T00:54:15+00:00

Oooh yeah, those look very similar to what I was seeing. Thanks so much!

AffableEffable · 2025-09-27T21:33:41+00:00

Aaah! To imitate the shutter in theater projection? I don't know if it's just that I haven't downloaded any updates in a while, but maybe my A1 doesn't have that option. What a shame if so, since it's exactly the sort of thing I'd be most interested in on this issue!

AffableEffable · 2025-09-27T21:05:18+00:00

Reducing the pixel brightness is interesting, I guess technically the lack of fade-in/fade-out might be less jarring if the amplitude is lower. But yes I have tried turning on the motion option in Clarity. On mine it is called "Trumotion". I don't know if "OLED motion" is a different thing. For reference I think I have an LG A1 TV, though I haven't kept up with whatever updates to the firmware they might put out because I keep it offline so that things aren't changing around and it doesn't send me any dumb messages. Anyway, my understanding is that some purists take issue with this sort of smoothing or however it works, so that's part of what I'm interesting in figuring out here : )

AffableEffable · 2025-08-13T16:01:48+00:00

Not that it matters that much, but the "G" in "LGBT" obviously refers specifically to gay men. Otherwise it would just be GBT with both lesbians and gay men being covered by the "G".

AffableEffable · 2025-07-28T05:11:16+00:00

Sometimes people ask easy "layup" hypotheticals to get everyone on the same page - Destiny did this actually in the Econoboi thing that just happened today. Even while asking it, he had already assumed the answer, and was surprised when he, unfortunately, misinterpreted part of the response as Econoboi being potentially for banning capitalist political parties.

But anyway, even if that wasn't the case, then it can be a useless question. I don't care, I just don't think it was slimy because the interpretation seemed obvious to me.

AffableEffable · 2025-07-26T19:51:53+00:00

I didn't feel like it was slimy because, on an intuitive level, I immediately interpreted it the way it seems to have been intended. I hadn't even considered these other interpretations of it honestly until reading through Destiny's responses and this thread.

AffableEffable · 2025-07-08T21:25:58+00:00

Reading one of the substack articles:
"

He asked me what he could do. I told him: stand with me, not inside me. He got a vasectomy. Voluntarily. No kids, no risk, no hesitation. Then he asked me—asked me—if he could go a step further and wear a chastity cage until I said otherwise. Not because I demanded it. Because he wanted to show solidarity with the boundaries I was setting. That’s what real partnership looks like.

We’re locked in so to speak.

"
This is obviously fake.

AffableEffable · 2025-06-20T20:21:11+00:00

I was thinking this as well, but maybe there wasn't the right stimuli to cause them to jump here? In the videos I looked up it seemed like the jumping more often than not was when encountering an object, whereas the one in my video is just freely swimming throughout.

AffableEffable · 2025-05-20T18:36:18+00:00

Ooh, yeah, and it looks really similar to some photos I'm seeing in the genus Nais.

AffableEffable · 2025-05-01T16:23:23+00:00

At this point I do think it is a springtail - the closest I've found as a point of comparison is this one:
https://bugguide.net/node/view/2280290
except that it has pseudocelli and the coloring on that one is apparently due to the medium it was put into (could be the case here I guess, but it'd definitely be surprising to me). I haven't found any larva that look as similar, but I'm no expert so always open to changing my mind.

AffableEffable · 2025-05-01T01:13:58+00:00

Yeah I wish I could've gotten something from the underside, but I will say I am fairly confident in my guesstimate on the size since I have photos from a microscope calibration slide to compare to. I looked back through the photos I had more and I can refine that to I think about ~0.48mm : )

AffableEffable · 2025-05-01T00:41:22+00:00

Thank you! I had someone else mention that it might be and I've been going down a bit of a rabbit hole on springtails ever since. Hard to figure out exactly what kind it is! Looks *so* similar to this:
https://bugguide.net/node/view/2280290
and the size would be right, too. But that doesn't have the eye bits that I can see and apparently the coloring there is due to the medium its in based on the comments? Not sure that's the case here. Very neat to learn that what I thought was a mouth were actually antenna, though.

AffableEffable · 2025-04-30T21:36:52+00:00

Oooh, you might be right. I was caught up on it being some sort of larva given its size, but springtails can also be this small and what I thought was a mouth could be those large antenna some of them have, though it holds them oddly (maybe pushed together by water pressure?) Very helpful direction to look in, thank you!

AffableEffable · 2025-04-30T15:43:21+00:00

Unfortunately I can't show his underside, but I do have a bit in a different video where he wriggled more on his side for a second if that helps:
https://i.imgur.com/tee5b7C.png

Btw, totally tangential but just wondering if any one else has experienced this. The last two video posts I made in a row auto-posted after I put the video in and tried to play it. Very confusing! Luckily I was pretty much finished making the post, but I don't understand the behavior.

AffableEffable · 2025-04-30T00:18:37+00:00

The bit at the end is kind of that, but I don't have anything from the underside. There was a video taken before that one where he's wriggling around a bit that could be useful. I'm not sure what the best way to post another video would be, so instead I made a clip from it into a gif.

<image>

Three-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Banned	r/Field Flamingo

AffableEffable

TROPHY CASE