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.