Photomicroscopy: Different image styles

I mentioned in a previous post that I have been using a microscope quite a lot in recent months and have been very much enjoying taking different styles of photograph. I was playing around with some images earlier and thought I'd put them together in a composite to show just some of the different optical techniques that are used within microscopy and how they can result in quite different looking images.

The subject here is a type of rotatoria, a tiny aquatic organism. This one is 0.3mm wide and in each photo it has been photographed at 160x magnification using an Olympus OM-D E-M1 and a Zeiss GFL microscope.

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The top left image is taken using a technique called Variable Amplitude Contrast (VAC), top right was taken with traditional brightfield, bottom right was taken using phase contrast and bottom left was taken using darkfield.

The same subject, the same camera and microscope, but 4 different ways of viewing the subject which all result in very different looking images.