Upping my game

My standard setup for most microscopy is a stereomicroscope and an LED ring light (switching to a compound microscope if I need to). Stereomicroscopes tend to be optimized for depth of field rather than resolution. Ring lights tend to produce flat images with minimal shadows because the light is directly above the specimen. Put the two together and the images tend to be low contrast and muddy. Adding adjustable low incident angle spot lighting produces controllable shadows and therefore adds to the 3D effect of the image. I'm a big fan of the 10W Ikea Jansjö LED worklamps for supplemental lighting - they're cheap and convenient but they do have a few issues. They are a warm colour (somewhere around 3000 K) and since my ring light is more of a daylight spectrum (around 5000 K), it's difficult to produce images with accurate colour. Second, they have quite a wide angle of incidence and thus tend to produce quite a lot of scatter.

Today I took delivery of a Brunel Microscopes Dual Flexilite LED unit - big shoutout to Brunel, it arrived 48 hours after ordering. It's well made and for a piece of microscope kit, reasonably priced. More importantly, it's bloody good. Using the carefully angled incident light from this unit to supplement the LED ring light (same colour), the resolution is much better than the ring light alone and considerably better than using the Jansjö LED lamps. Sadly, the specimens I pulled out of the freezer to try it out on were both immature, but I'm very happy with the quality of the images.



A juvenile Metellina, which I strongly suspect is M. merianae, but I can't prove it:




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Gonatium rubens? Gongylidium rufipes? Hypomma bituberculatum? We'll never know! Don't worry about it and just admire the quality of the image!

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