As I was catching up with all of your blogs (500+ unread posts, eek!), I came across Resurrection Fern’s fascinating iPhone microscope photos. Aren’t they beautiful? I was very disappointed when a quick search revealed that the microscope gadget doesn’t fit my poor “old” iPhone 3. A bit more searching ensued, and revealed a little usb microscope for attaching to your computer. Then a penny dropped – I’ve seen one of those at work! I unearthed it from the bottom of the Science Box yesterday, and brought it home for a quick play.
So far I can say that I’m really enjoying playing with the camera, but the software leaves an awful lot to be desired! First of all, this camera is too old to be properly Mac-compatible, which is very frustrating. Not to mention the ridiculous mini-cd that houses the software, which doesn’t fit into a single computer in this house. Thankfully the computers at work are old enough to have a proper cd tray, and I was able to copy the software to a usb stick. I installed the drivers on my netbook, which was easy enough, and the camera worked straight away.
Sadly, after I’d named and saved all 30 photos individually (no batch operations, how unhelpful!), half of them wouldn’t open. The jpegs turned out to be corrupted, so they obviously hadn’t saved properly. When I got the remaining photos onto a nice large screen, I could see that most of them were out of focus, which was disappointing. The focus wheel is pretty much the entire body of the camera, which means that as you’re trying to sharpen the image you’re also moving the lens. That’s never going to work, especially not at 200x magnification!
But, the microscope + netbook combination is easily portable, which means that I’ll be able to take the whole lot outside with me and see what I can find. And the newest version of the microscope looks to have much better software and higher magnification, even though it’s still only a 2mp camera.
I don’t think I’m quite ready to give Richard Weston a run for his money, but I do have some ideas for incorporating designs inspired by these images into some new textile work. The question is, will I ever have time to make it?!