Radiolaria

Some time ago I came across an old book online by a German scientist and artist  Ernst Haeckel , called  Kunstformen der Natur . Haeckel discovered several new species and this book is full of his beautiful illustrations. One group which really captivated me were the Radiolaria.  These tiny, beautiful and delicate creatures live in the oceans and are a form of protozoa which have intricate mineral skeletons taking on many interesting forms. When they die their skeletons fall to the ocean floor, of which they make up a large part, as siliceous ooze.

I tried to find a source of samples with no luck but eventually found a company, IDS, which prepare slides of a strew of Radiolaria for a very reasonable price. I ordered one and patiently waited six weeks for the slide to arrive.

On looking through my scope I was not disappointed. I was struck by the amazing geometrical forms and patterns before my eyes. Using the 20x objective with bright field illumination, I was able to get good views of them but because of their interesting 3d shape I would need to stack several images at different focus points to get a good 3d view. I eventually created 31 images each with between 20 and 30 images stacked.

This is a 25 image stack with brightfield illumination. x20 objective.

I had seen elsewhere that the delicate structures could be enhanced by inverting the images using Photoshop. I used the Image > Adjustments > Invert option to do this which left me with a bluish colour cast. I used Image > Adjustments > Desaturate to achieve this. This left the backround still too light so I used the Camera Raw Filter to drop the highlights, boost up the contrast, increase the Clarity and darken the background. If necessary I sharpened the resulting image using Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask..

The image has been desaturated.

The final image after being inverted , and adjusted in Photoshop.

Using the x40 objective.

The above image desaturated.

I'm pleased with the results and some of them remind me of Haeckel's drawings. I thought it might be a good idea to make a composite image using all of the 31 originals. I created a new image 10,000 x 7500 pixels and a black background in Photoshop and opened several originals at a time. I used the lasoo tool to cut out interesting specimens and paste them onto the background image until I had covered it fairly uniformly. I duplicated a few of the best specimens and used Edit > Transform  > Rotate, and Edit > Transform > Scale to add a bit of variation . Finally I used the Layers Pallet to flatten the image to a single layer.

Here is the composite image.

Poppy Seeds

Poppy fields are an inspiring sight. There was one close by some years back next to Hopwas woods but it became a pig field and no more poppies. There are still plenty in my local area growing along the side of the old dry canal bed just outside the city. 

The two yellow Poppies below are currently growing just in front of the study window. Once they have been pollinated the central part of the flower becomes the seed capsule. The flower dies away and the pod hardens forming the seed capsules as in the two pictures below. They look like purpose built seed dispensers slowly dispersing the seeds inside as they are blown about by the wind. Ingenious. Each individual seed is an embryonic plant protected by a hard cover, the seed coat. Each capsule contains hundreds of seeds.

Yellow Poppies growing just outside my front door.

Poppy seed dispenser 1

Poppy seed dispenser 2

This is a seed capsule of a Red Poppy.  Each one contains hundreds of seeds. x10

Seed capsule from a Yellow Poppy x10

Lid of a seed capsule.

Ripe seeds inside the capsule. x30

Seeds in capsule x60

Poppy seeds x10

Poppy Seeds x30

Yellow Poppy seeds x6o

Red Poppy Seeds x60.

Poppy Seeds

Poppies 

Anyone for Tennis?

Every so often I discover something out of the blue that I never expected and that I haven't seen before. A few weeks ago I was tidying the backyard when I noticed an unusual looking plant with several large buds trailing down on my fence from a neighbour's garden.  Right at the end was a beautiful and unusual flower. I tracked it down online - it was a Passionflower and I took a pollen sample for examination.

Most pollen looks fairly ordinary under a microscope and is most often coffee bean shaped. But this was different. The best way to describe what I was seeing was a bunch of golden tennis balls each with the typical curved furrow pattern found on a tennis ball! The grains are large. Large enough to get some good images and so I made several sets of images and aligned and stacked them in Photoshop and I'm pleased with the results. Posting them online I got several tennis jokes as I expected so I created an image of a tennis racket  substituting tennis balls for pollen grains!

Deep Dreams

A few days ago I came across an interesting piece of software produced by google called .Deepdream It's a neural network that can take an image and using its artificial intelligence analyse the picture and produce its own version. It can produce some really wierd results with effects like "Trippy", and "Demonic" !!

Google provide the basics and you have to implement them on a web page so it's not for the feint hearted. Luckily some kind people have implemented  it for us to use but queues for processing are long and sometimes infinite!! I found a page which enabled me to get a result within 15 seconds but today it's offline.

However, I managed to submit several images successfully and the best of them are posted below. I found that resubmitting the modified image several times using different effects worked well.

 

This was my first attempt : Edensor Church on the Chatsworth Estate.

 This is Charlie!

 Shugborough estate and daffodils.

 The bridesmaid.

 A selfie of Elaine and I