Tiny beauty: how I make scientific art from behind the microscope | Hacker News Reader

Tiny beauty: how I make scientific art from behind the microscope

nature.com

135 pointspseudolus20 comments

Much more of such beautiful imagery can be found at Nikon's Small World Competition that's been running for 50 years [1].

[1] https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/photomicrography-c...

If you like this you might also like the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos: https://youtube.com/@journeytomicro?si=FWOd1qA3CbG2Yb_V

Journey to the Microcosmos is fantastic, highly recommend!

Chloé Savard is a scientist who contributes to the series, she posts beautiful microcosmos photos on instagram

https://www.instagram.com/tardibabe

Enjoy!

Yup, It's a shame that they're going to close the channel

Beautiful images.

If you have an SLR/DSLR camera you can buy a macro lens and a flash and get some surprisingly good close ups of insects - with all sorts of details you can't see with the naked eye. You can safari in your own garden or nearby land. It opens up a whole new world. You'll need an electron microscope for viruses though!

You can even shoot in the field using a microscope! I designed a 3D-printed mount to attach a $25 4x microscope objective to a DSLR or mirrorless camera:

https://www.printables.com/model/143754-microscope-adapter-f...

A shorter version of the adapter "underclocks" the objective to 2x magnification, which is much easier to hand-hold:

https://www.printables.com/model/397489-microscope-adapter-f...

If you already have a 3D printer then this is a very cheap way to get started.

Cool. If you don't have a microscope and 3d printer than check out Laowa macro lenses. They are fairly affordable. Note that they are manual focus, auto focus is generally not very for macro photography.

Ps/ I like that it makes your camera look like a weevil. ;0)

Probably worth paying up for a ring light. Flash can cause unpredictable and hard to control glare and hot spots.

In macro photography, flashes are usually used with a big diffuser. Ring lights probably have their own issues and don't seem to be that popular with macro photographers (from my non-expert knowledge).

Great photos, especially being colored by hand.

I'd love to see these in a museum with background information about the subjects and stories like the raspberry fungus.

Fascinating and unique way to merge science and creativity.

Sadly it's a dying art form. 40-50 years ago every scientific university department used to have a scientific photographer to allow the researchers to publish their photos in articles. My own godfather was a scientific photographer who retired and started commercializing scientific photos.

Unfortunately now, due to shrinking budgets and the proliferation of iPhones the need for such photographers is vanishing.

Maybe we need scientific sculptors. 3D printing and cnc machines will allow some interesting 3d forms to be generated.

I wonder if there are no colors at that scale

The false colouring is mainly due to the fact that they are using beams of electrons, not visible light. But a typical virus is ~100nm ( https://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-are-viruses/ ) and the wave length of green light ~500 nm. So I guess it isn't really meaningful to ask 'what colour is a virus'.

I guess the coloring is faked to make these images look better (or in the case of electron microscopy to have color at all). Would an AI be able to produce these colors given an EM image?

I mean, this is covered in the first paragraph of the article, and then elaborated on further down.

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