#1298. Beyond Macro, Micro!

I studied Sciences in my youth, and kept my curiosity intact since then, so once launched in the so-called “adult life” I became found of Olympus for their extraordinary gear for macro-photography, purchased all their best optics, flashes, bellows… you name it; and even ended up purchasing a microscope, a binocular and an optic fibre lighting unit…

 

I share a “family picture” of a fraction of that gear, not out of some nostalgia (quoique…), but because I waited decades for Olympus to release a simple digital FF camera (with the same “multi-spot zone system” would have been even better), compatible with all this stuff, flashes included… after all, Nikon, the “other” brand for macro, did it.

Well, bad luck, it never happened, Olympus went four third, and still today I feel abandoned 🙁

 

I tried to make things “compatible”, but it is still a chore, and re-buying it all is not only out of my present financial reach, but most items simply don’t exist anymore…

 

With the Sony A7R2 and adapters, I can use all the optics, auto-bellow, etc, and the sensor/optics seem a capable match, but not the flash system… and in macro a TTL ring flash with a cross-polarized filter is a dream, just as an example.

We all know that, with technology, we must sometimes “scratch it and move on”, but I never contemplated “writing off” a small fortune invested in gear and buying inferior things… oh well 🙂

 

In 1991 in Switzerland, my four years old first son started to show a real interest for “all these things”, and one day I decided to show him micro-cristallography; I used an “amateur” approach, simply with a few pills grabbed on the house pharmacy, crushed in distilled water or isopropyl alcool, a quart-wave glass and patience; some produced nothing, some were a big surprise 🙂

Watching him spending literally hours with his eyes glued to the microscope was a beautiful experience.

 

I took pictures with my Olympus OM-4 Ti and my trusty Fujichrome 50 Velvia.

Some viewers said one of the photos looked like a telescope capture, another one like a view of a glacier in Island from a plane 🙂

In 1999, having moved to Canada, I found the box with the slides and decided to scan them with my Nikon Coolscan V.

 

I share here a small selection, sometimes with the same photo being taken with the quart-wave polarizing class slightly turned, to show the false colours produced by the polarization.

 

 

 

 

A great pleasure for me is to see these colours still so vibrant, for something taken 32 years ago… and a kind signal to life to resume film macro… maybe 🙂