Digital camera settings for microphotography:
This article explains the optimum settings to use when taking digital camera photographs through the microscope.
The purpose of this paper is to help microscopists photograph, store, and use digital microphotographs using modern digital cameras and transmitted-light microscopes. Discussion focuses on selection of cameras adapt well to microscope eyepieces or trinocular heads, and on camera settings and procedures to obtain best quality photographs. We also discuss image resolution and size settings and make recommendations. Cameras used as examples in this paper include the Nikon Coolpix series 990, 995, and 4500.
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[The photograph at page very top is one of our earliest attempts at photographing Aspergillus sp. using lacto phenol cotton blue stain. Even a beginner can obtain very good microphotographs with just a little care. The photograph shown here is of one of our stereoscopic microscopes in use for making digital photographs.
The techniques discussed in this paper work well with digital cameras and any type of microscope, low power stereo zoom to high power forensic polarized light microscopes.]
PAAA 2005 Symposium, University of Tulsa, Tulsa Oklahoma - June 2-5, 2005 - updated 02/23/2009 - updated 2015/10/25
Note: the latest version of this document can be found at
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last update 20 August 2007 © Daniel Friedman All Rights Reserved
The Nikon Coolpix 900-series and the 4500 camera can take wonderful photos on fully automatic, but to make photomicrographs you may have more success if you make use of some of the manual camera settings as follows (for the Coolpix 990. Find and make the comparable settings in the 850, 950 and 4500 menus). Most other digital cameras will have a similar set of camera setting options but they may be organized around a different menu system. Find and adjust the equivalent settings on your particular camera, using the guidelines listed below.
In general the "automatic" settings of the camera work pretty well - it has general modes of "Automatic", Manual, Program, and Shutter - set by holding Mode (Func 1) button on camera top and turning the thumb wheel - your camera should start in "Automatic".
The camera has a number of image size (3:2, XGA, VGA, FINE) settings and within XGA and VGA you also specify the resolution (Basic, Normal, Fine, and "HI" the last of which makes a huge TIFF file you don't normally want). Image size refers to the intended final display or print size. Resolution refers to the level of data compression in the stored image file. Larger size and higher resolution mean larger image files (and more disk space consumption).
We usually shoot at XGA-Fine which will let us print a high-resolution 8x10 photo if we want a printout, but keeps the disk file sizes down to a manageable 200-300K bytes. You could shoot at XGA-Fine with good result but if you ever want to crop and zoom in on a particle in your photo you may not like the quality. If you want to save disk space and if you never plan to zoom in or enlarge your images, shoot at VGA-Fine which will produce excellent but smaller photos. Remember however that often you may want to enlarge a portion of a photomicrograph to see detail or for publication. You can't do much enlarging of a "VGA" image.
To email photos to someone you'll want to use a photo editing program to make a smaller, lower-resolution image to get the file size down to about 30K. (Folks who have the CD-ROM from the Laurentides Spore Camp received down-sized images which you'll see don't stand up to close scrutiny nor to any zooming.)
Some experts argue that one need not bother to keep images of higher resolution than the resolution capacity of the printer to be used for final images. Because we use images for reference and identification (email-exchange) purposes, often with images cropped and enlarged, and because we rarely print large images, the choice of image size is not reduced to printer resolution.
In sum: for image library purposes and printing up to 8x10 you do not need to store high resolution, large image size files - which wastes disk space. However if you need to crop and enlarge a portion of a photographic image you will want to shoot at higher resolutions and perhaps sizes. If in the microscope we know in advance I'm going to want to crop and enlarge we shoot at fine or high resolution image sizes. we have not required use of uncompressed TIFF type images for these purposes.
Turn the camera on to "Manual" mode" Not to confuse with the "Automatic" overall MODE setting above, to use the Coolpix through the microscope eyepiece we shoot with the ON-OFF DIAL in "Manual" mode (as opposed to fully Automatic) - set the dial that turns the camera on to "M" rather than "A".
Press the "Menu" button on the back of the camera (above the display screen) and then using the round thumb button to scroll and select, and the "picture taking" button to select each setting (there are shortcuts which I'm leaving out for simplicity), choose the following settings:
The *** items are helpful for better photomicrographs but are not essential.
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