Hibiscus Pollen

This ought to make you sneeze.

1. This is one of 8 or 10 pads on the Pistil of the flower. This is what collects the pollen from other flowers, then fertilizes the plant. To the eye, it is smooth and looks like soft leather. About 40x.

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Cool shots Mitch, esp like 2 and 4.

Fascinating shots Mitch.

Linda

Thanks Kurt and Linda. These shots were lit from the side, with a high intensity halogen fiber optic gooseneck illuminator. I used a small white opaque plastic cup that I cut the bottom out of to stick the lens through, then trimmed the height, so it would allow me to adjust the height of the stage on the microscope to achieve focus. Think diffuser.

Once the cup is in place, you aim the two fiber optic lights at the side of the cup. This allows the lighting you see here. If I had just used the light from the bottom like normal microscope lighting, the pollen is too thick for the light to come though and all you see is a silhouette.

Excellent, and interesting shots.

And I thought standard macro shots were complicated enough!.

Thanks Bas. It's not very difficult to view this stuff in the microscope, but getting the images was very hard to learn. If you've ever looked in a scope, the light that comes through is like the light from a pinhole. Not very much. That means lower shutter speeds, really low shutter speeds. These were all at 1/15" and ISO 400. Only possible, because pollen doesn't move. LOL

When shooting the little bugs, like rotifers and parameciums, you have to try some other tricks.

great colorful shots...liked all esp 1,2,4...

Thanks Rakesh. Yes, this one has a lot of nice colors to it.

Interesting stuff - think Hibiscus pollen is about the largest I've seen
Brian v.

Thanks Brian. I think you may be right. I know I did try to focus on it using the 20x objective and there just was not enough DOF to make it worth while on a round object like pollen. I have used the 20x on other pollen though. What struck me as different with these are the points on them.

No wonder pollen makes you sneeze. Looks like little tiny medieval morning stars!
Great series, as always, thanks for sharing!

Thanks for looking. This is the first spiked pollen I have seen. Somehow I got the impression most pollen looked like this, but not so. So far, most pollen I have seen looks like a raw wheat or barley grains in miniature.

That is pretty fascinating stuff, Mitch, and goes to show that even the tiniest parts of flowers are beautiful

Thanks John. And this isn't even near high magnification. All these were taken at the lowest end of the spectrum, and even so, you can still see individual cells in that red column of the stamen, called the filament. I can see why the bugs eat the pollen though, it does kind of look like candy.

fab shots, makes me feel like sneezing just looking at it lol