Microscope Induction

After doing a bit of research I discovered that at the University of Manchester they had the required Microscopes with the polarized light that I needed to use to capture the images. After emailing a few of the technicians there I was finally able to arrange a date for me to be inducted on the microscopes. This took several hours and I had to supply all my own slips and covers and the materials that I would like to look at. I was really keen on doing some similar processes with the alcohol that i had previously looked at on bev shots but the process wasn’t as straight forward as I thought it would be. I Would have to crystalize the alcohol myself which naturally can take a long period of time and after doing a lot of research on methods finally come to the conclusion that many scientists proposed that it could take up to 100 attempts before they captured anything visually inspiring. With the time limit in this project I just simply did not have enough time to take this risk as it wasn’t the major aspect of my project. Instead I just looked at different types of stones rocks and minerals that were ready available for me to use. Using the software was a lot harder that I expected it to be, especially using the polarized light. I was also disappointed with the outcome of the quality of the images and felt that most of them really did lack colour which was not the concept I was going for. I do think after editing some of the following photos though they are still visualy interesting but is highly unlikely that I will be able to develop the picture any further due to the lack of quality and would look un professional in my videos.

I would definitely like to use this technique again within a future project when I have a better time scale and more knowledge on the processes i can achieve. As the microscopes themselves were not cheap, paying by the hour up to £30 for particular ones, so I would have to have a definite idea of what I wanted to look at before I go in next time.