Hostas Stalk Slices

The flowers are all gone, but the stalks are still standing, so I cut a couple slices to see what they looked like.

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very cool shots.

Thanks Bluedogs. I had done some shots of a grape vine leaf stem the other day and it's kind of surprising how similar the architecture of that vine and this stalk were when looked at under magnification. I guess when you have a good design, don't mess with it. This one has lasted millions of years.

It is certainly a unique world inside living things, and these are extremely intertesting shots.

Let's hope you don't get the urge to slice up a Bas and see what that looks like

excellent work Mitch.

Thanks Bas. I would like to look at some Bass scales, but don't really want to cut him up.

These slices are extremely interesting. I think I might have to look up more information about them and find out the names of the parts. Doesn't hurt that they are also beautiful to look at.

Awesome! Love that deep green. Any PP on these Mitch, or SOOC? What about lighting?

Thanks again Freddy. The EXIF is intact, but these are very thin slices made with a razor blade. They are the width of a #2 pencil lead, without the wood. I used a Nikon Fluophot research microscope with a Canon T1i mounted on the trinocular port at the top of the scope. I made whats called an oblique lighting filter made from heavy black posterboard, that when placed above the condenser under the stage, allows only a thin slit of light through to the bottom of the slide, and from the side. Because the light is coming from a steep angle at the side, it would just go right on through the glass slide and not up through the objective lens. When the light does hit something, in this case, the slice of stalk, it is then bounced up into the lens and then up the tube to my camera. It's an elegant invention and you see the results. It has the effect of turning anything in the background black.

This was taken with a 10x objective lens, then through a 2.5x projector lens, then up through two sets of Kenko tubes and into the camera sensor. It works out roughly to 100 power or so.

PP is just convert from RAW in CS5, then a little bit of levels and convert to TIFF to resize for the forum and sharpen a little bit, then converted to jpg.

nice series...interesting pattern every object has...

Thanks Rakesh, I want to learn more about plants, cause each row of cells has a purpose. I'd like to know what that is.

Mitch, I sitting here imagining your setup .. mind posting a picture or two of your "lab"? I just might start a thread so newbies hand holding 100mm lenses (like me) can actually see how much $, effort, and time goes into the space and equipment you experts use. Since its photos, it could go in this same MACRO photo sharing section, no?

BTW, my thoughts exactly when I saw the pics .. each row of cells has a purpose as they obviously have different shapes, sizes, and colors .. you know, its like there's a whole parallel universe right next to us which we never think about because we can't see it with our naked eyes .. unless you put some tubes on

Freddy, I use a Canon T1i mounted on a microscope. As you see in this image though, I also use Kenko tubes.

Oh I'm so not worthy! That setup is da bomb

Hey, I got the camera, tubes, and lens .. just missing the microscope part

Well, believe it or not, that scope cost less than half of what a Canon 100 Macro costs new.

And, I know where another just like it is for sale, but not for that cheap.