See my [[Micro-photography]] note for how this project started.
For the second round, I decided to connect the Zenit directly to the microscope’s camera mount instead of attaching lenses one by one. The microscope came with a **1x eyepiece mount** for cameras, so I used that to attach the body.
### **What I found**
1. **Magnification issues**
The 1x eyepiece mount worked, but the magnification was nowhere near as strong as the **25x eyepieces** on the main viewing tube. This makes sense for digital cameras, since they can zoom in digitally. But with film, that “extra magnification” just isn’t there, which makes it a limitation for my setup.
2. **Focus challenges**
Getting the correct focus is still tricky. The **distance from lens to film plane** is extremely sensitive—just a small shift can ruin sharpness.
3. **Circular samples in the photo**
In the viewfinder, I could see the sample filling the whole frame as a rectangle. But when the film came back, the images showed up as **circles inside the frame**. I’m not sure yet why this mismatch happens, but it’s something to look into.
4. **Exposure experiments**
Exposure continues to be an issue. I tested shutter speeds at **1/500, 1/250, 1/125, and 1/60**. Out of these, **1/60** gave the closest to correct exposure, but there’s still room to refine this.
5. **Next steps**
For the next experiment, I’ll try:
- Longer exposure times
- Higher magnification eyepieces
- Directly mounting higher-power microscope objectives to the camera, since that actually gave more promising results than the camera mount in these first two trials.
### Here’s the setup for this attempt:
> [!figure] ![[MP-Setup-2.jpeg]]
### And here are some resulting images:
![[MP2-IMG_01.jpg]]
![[MP2-IMG_02.jpg]]
![[MP2-IMG_03.jpg]]