Lighting to bright for micro.

Hi everybody i need some help with this problem i have a Nikon 990 digital camera which i wanted for taking micro pictures hooked up to a microscope received the older Nikon about 1 week now but i am a little confused on the lighting of the camera.Some times when i shoot a picture it come out black and the micro scope has a great light on it when i shoot the picture it comes up in the monitor OK but when i play it back to look at the pictures the frames are black so what i did was lighten the lens then the pictures come to light i have a white piece of card on the platform to put the small minerals on it to shoot the pictures were should i put the exposures meter on and how can i correct this.The camera has auto settings on it with focus lock and auto focus also manual settings i am new at this so can anybody help thanks RAS.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I have had similar issues photographing through my trinocular microscope. Remember that the eyepiece of the camera collects light as well as the lens. Normally, when your eye is to the camera, it blocks the light coming in through the eyepiece. However, you're probably not looking through the eyepiece when the camera is mounted to the microscope, therefore extra light is getting into the camera. Since the amount of light reaching the camera from the microscope is already reduced, the excess light coming in through the eyepiece causes the camera to miscalculate the amount of available light, resulting in a dark photo.

To remedy this, turn off the lights in the room before your photo, or cover the eyepiece completely to block incoming light.

This may or may not be your problem - but it was my problem when I first started taking photos through my microscope.

Robert,

Your description of the problem isn't entirely clear to me. In any case, you should set the camera to the manual exposure mode and then set aperture wide open and adjust the shutter speed to get the proper exposure. You may also have to adjust the zoom, on the camera, to get full illumination of the field without vignetting. Set the manual focus to infinity. I am assuming that you are shooting through a digicam eyepiece.

Gene

I have been playing with the light and manipulating it in post processing to try and get the luster to come out right in a photo. Here is an extreme one I did the other day. The original photo was so bright you could not identify there was even anything in the picture. But after adjusting the mid-levels, brightness and contrast the crystal appears out of the light. And lastly a size comparison in normal light.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2010 01:56PM by Jason Box.