Hi Greyframe!

As you asked - that’s my microscopic equipment. I use an vintage (from the 70ies) Zeiss (West) Standard RA which is equipped for DIC (differential interference contrast), phase contrast, polarization and for good, old, bright field. For DIC I use planachromatic objectives and for bright field I use planapochromatic ones, if possible.

It’s old stuff but these gadgets are very robust and they are still working perfectly well. Moreover, their level of optical performance is not so far away from contemporary benchmarks. Many of these old microscopes are still in use in research facilities all over the world.

My camera is a Canon EOS 70D and I combine it with an old Leitz Elmarit-R 35mm. Microphotography easily pushs optics to its limits and an Elmarit simply yields a slightly better resolution than Canon lenses. The difference is not big, but you can spot it nevertheless. For microscopic sessions I use live-remote-control-mode, that’s much more comfortable than anything else.

Zeiss ceased production of these microscopes at the end of the 80ies or so, so their original camera-adapters don’t fit to digital DSLRs. Fortunately I found someone who was able to build me a fitting adapter. Quite the same is true for the lamp - I use a LED instead of the original light bulb and this contraption was built and adapted by another microscopy buff.

Ah, and I use a software called Zerene for stacking. It’s output still needs some adjustment of contrast and brightness and some cleaning up, too. Nevertheless, if you don’t have microscopic pictures of high quality and high resolution as an input you cannot end up with a good picture in the end. Photoshop cannot compensate for bad resolution and so on.