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...

I used my first microscope for about ten years. It had no zoom and no foto-tubus. Taking photographs through the ocular was not really satisfying.

I bought my second microscope from my first bonus. It was an Olympus SZ60 and 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-camera and started with taking photos. I used special tungsten film for diapositives. From 36 photos of one single film had I could make use of only two in average. The rest was scrap. Between taking pictures and getting the processed film from the lab have been passed several days, and I didn’t really remember what was wrong with the parameter settings. The exposure time was normally between 30 and 60 seconds, and I could only have a rough idea, how the photo would probably look like while looking through the viewfinder. This efficiency was finally too bad and costly for me, and I gave up photographing for some years.

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 microscope itself and the illumination.

End of 2004 I bought my third microscope, the Carl Zeiss Discovery.V12. I used a Nikon coolpix 8400 camera, attempts with a Canon D5 failed. SLR cameras 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 was no longer relevant. The challenge now is making use of this and although let a photo appear naturally and and give it 3-dimensional properties.

All the time I use a halogen light source (250W from Schott). I hate LEDs because of the high light density which spoils almost every picture, at least without diffusing. And the colours aren't really true, see also Tony Petersons remarks on the micromounting message board.

In May 2008 I got the upgrade to V.20 (FOV 20...1 mm) and the adapter for a Canon G9. 12 Mipxels instead of previously 8 and a spread of the Microscope to a max magnification of 225x instead of 150x before. All of my pictures dated 6/2008 and later are 12 mp fotos compressed to 1000x750 pixels.

In December 2008 I got a brand new Nikon Coolpix P6000. Although I didn't expect a significant improvement any more there is one. My reason for taking the P6000 was originally the remote shutter release feature with an infrared remote control. This gives the opportunity to take lots of layer pictures without having a hand on the camera or the microscope either, with improves quality at high magnifications. Before, every touch only in order to release the shutter (with 2 sec. delay of course) gives a micro impact to the whole system with vibrations and movement of the object. The noise behaviour is better than with the Canon G9, and there is actually no need anymore for any compensation of artifacts or anything else. Upcoming new pictures from January 2009 on are now compressed from 13,5 Mp pictures. Since Nikon uses a new RAW format with the P6000 neither Helicon nor Nikon capture NX can postprocess this format so far. Because of that I was forced to switch to JPEG only, but surprisingly there is no real disadvantage appearingly. Judge Yourself.