FACTORS IN CONSIDERING WHAT TO BUY

We assume that photomicrography will be carried out using digital technology. The original equipment is more expensive but the overall costs are lower and good images come quickly.

You can use a digital still camera or a digital video camera. If all images are destined for the web, it is unlikely that you will want to have images that are bigger than 1000 pixels. Virtually all digital still and video cameras exceed the specdifications

You will need a special adaptor to attach the camera to the microscope. Ask the manufacturers of the microscope, or their representatives, for advice.

There are an array of specialised cameras for photomicrography, and they often come with software that makes life considerably easier - such as software that will allow you to add scale bars, compile (stitch) tiled images, or make extended focus images. Unfortunsately, they typically cost an arm and a leg - but it is usually simple to take images of a micrometer slide to make up an array of scale bars

If you are working with live material, you will wish to take images at less than 10 msec exposures so that they are sharp

Cameras should be able to send a live feed to a computer screen and ideally images should be captured by the computer.

DOING THE BIZ

Check out the advice for getting sharp images

The image should fill as much of the camera chip as possible, there is negligible opportunity to 'blow up' (enlarge) digital images. This will tend to favor use of the highest magnification objectives (which will probably require immersion-oil. This means that you will probably be unable to return to lower magnifications without risk of getting oil on non-oil objectives - a very bad thing to happen). Use intermediary lenses or the zoom function on the camera if there is one.

Try to orient the object axially in the frame, as this will reduce the effort in editing the captured image

Set the light and camera so that the images can be taken at 10 msec or less.

Keep snapping until you have what you need, add a scale bar to that image, save it, and throw the rest away.

Save in a lossless format such as tif . We advise using a standard naming protocol that will help you identify what was taken, where and why. paramecium_aurelia_050910_esa.tif tells me the organism, date, sample site, and image format.

Generally speaking, images should be taken a little dull, and the contrast recovered using image-manipulation software