Speedy Lumpkin And The Yeast Brigade

This Amoeba is from my Petri Dish sample source. I have kept this source alive for almost a year now. It is just a pinch of moss from my yard that I collected last spring and have added water to it to keep it active. Two days ago I added a small bit of yeast to it, as a food source for the ciliates and microbes that live in it. As you can see, they are taking advantage of it.

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Awesome colors. Are these taken with that two-way polarizing technique you've been using lately? Everything you've done since starting that has had terrific, vibrant colors.

Thanks Ryan. Yes, this is with the new Phase Contrast condenser I got a few months ago. The Nikon scope I have is Circa 1975 or so, so it was very modern tech then, and the problem was finding this part. Very few of them were made initially, since this was a top of the line research scope of the day. Very expensive for it's time and few were bought.

I lucked out finding this part on E-bay. It was hiding in China. The guy was asking too much, but I made a low ball offer and he accepted. Another problem with this equipment is, you must use objective lenses made for it. So I had the condenser, now I needed the lenses. It was another couple months before I found a set of objective lenses on E-bay and was lucky enough to win them.

In conjunction with each other, what the two parts do, the Phase Contrast condenser and the Phase Contrast lenses is, the condenser twists the light coming in by 1/4 wave length, it passes through the subjects on the slide and up into the objective lenses, where it is then twisted back in phase and sent up through the eyepieces or the camera.

In passing, the light is able to reflect off of all the smaller objects on the slide that normal light just passes through without being reflected from. Everything we "see" is from light being interrupted in it's path. The twisting of the wavelength by 1/4 allows more to be seen. A byproduct is the green and gray background colors. It was one of the big inventions in microscopy and led to a huge jump in our understanding of how life works.

Great work Mitch.

I was a fan of your work beofre captain Kirk introduced your new fanlged techology, but I must admit the new shots are more visually interesting.

Thanks Bas. Visually interesting, but also scientifically informative. See all the tiny things in the background and inside the amoeba? Those would have all been invisible before. If you watched the video, you can see all the particles inside the amoeba which were invisible before and with staining can now be identified as starches, sugars, acidic cell parts like the nucleus, bacteria and other cell parts.

nice shot mitch...

Cool stuff Mitch.

Thanks Rakesh and Kurt. It's amazing how much and how fast those amoebas can eat.

MITCH!
Here you are! I don't see you around much but I guess that you have immersed yourself
Glad to see you're still shooting, just no longer from boats, at birds..

Really nice shots you've uploaded here. Loved the YouTube vids, but the iPad won't show me your Flash site ... Mac *shrug* ...

Hey Joayne. Glad to see you. I do stop in to Birds now and then to see whats going on.

I have just changed the lens on the camera. A microscope is just a specialized lens, and would you believe it, much cheaper than Bird Glass. And there is just so much to see. Whole neighborhoods in a drop of water and worlds in a cup. It's amazing.