salt
My old SRT101 is truely an amazingly versitile piece of equipment. I recently acquired a relatively inexpensive used Minolta microscope adapter for my SRT101. This picture is the best of about 10 pictures I took as an experiment. The subject is salt. I first dissolved some salt in water on a microscope slide and then waited for it to crystallize again as the water evaporated. I am pretty surprised by the quality of this shot. High resolution scans of the negative are even more impressive, but are far too big for posting on this web site. Wet mounted slides of microscopic aquarium life have come out somewhat less sharp, at least with this first attempt. I am guessing that that is due to the camera's shutter shaking the microscope and vibrating the water on the wet mount slides. I did try to minimize this shaking by using the mirror lockup feature and a cable release. I used the SRT's built in light meter and used the shutter speed to adjust exposure. Shutter speeds were around 1/30th to 1/60th of a second and film was Kodak's new 400 ASA Gold, which I have recently started using. I also added a blue filter to the microscope's light source to remove the yellow cast that the tungsten lamp would otherwise produce. The microscope is a fairly inexpensive (around $200) student model that has maximum power of 400x. This picture was taken at 100x magnification. s