Born in 1958, I collect minerals since I was a 14 years old boy. In the very first years I became a micromounter, for cost reasons originally, but many of those species are not at all available in bigger dimensions than some tenth of a millimeter. Such a micromount-collection requires not much space and swapping and buying is very easy with partners all around the world. Additionally those little crystals are very often more perfect than their big brothers.

Beside the fascination of minerals itself there was a big motivation for me taking photos of my items. The vision of an encyclopedia was born. For reaching that goal there is a lot to do, I am working on that...

My first scope during my education time was one without zoom and without foto-tubus. Taking photographs through the ocular was possible, but not really satisfying.

My second scope then had both, a zoom and a photo tubus. I used that for a long period of time. I built myself an adapter for a SLR-analog-camera and tried to start with taking photos. I had to use special tungsten film for diapositives. From 36 photos one film had I could use only two. The rest was scrap. Up to this point of knowledge there have been several days passed, and I didn’t really know what was wrong with the parameter settings. The shutter time was normally between 30 and 60 seconds, through the viewfinder one could only have a rough idea, how the photo would probably look like. This efficiency was finally too bad for me, and I gave up for that time.

The breakthrough came for me with the invention of digital cameras. Immediately after taking a photo I could see if it was good or not. From then on the camera was not longer the limitation, but the scope and the illumination.

End of 2004 I bought my third scope, the Carl Zeiss Discovery.V12. As a camera I used a Nikon coolpix 8400, attempts with a Canon D5 failed. SLRs suffer from dust on the imager in connection with multi-layer technique.
The further breakthrough came with depth of view enhancing software using the multi-layer technique. The good old Abbe formula is no longer relevant. The challenge now is make use of this and although let a foto appear naturally and and give it 3D properties.

In May 2008 I got the upgrade to V.20 (FOV 20...1 mm) and the adapter for a Canon G9 which Carl Zeiss supports with software soon. 12 Mipxels instead of 8 and a spread of the Microscope to a max magnification of 225x. First results are really convincing. All of my pictures dated 6/2008 and later are 12 mp fotos compressed to 1000x750 pixels.