#microscopy art

I’m continuing to gawk at intricate structures under the microscope.

It’s easy to forget how tremendously complicated and fascinating even the banalest objects are. Under the microscope, we can attempt to appreciate the structures that form everyday objects and get a sense of the world around us. Yet, even the microscope can only capture a slice of reality, only go finger deep into the ocean; the value of magnification can always be cranked further up, and under each layer there will always be another.

Just a jumble of fibers, what else was I expecting? But look at what a wonderful jumble it is. How the fibers curve and intertwine. Sparse around the edges, tangling up in that one spot. At first glance, I thought it resembled a sci-fi creature; a spider, perhaps.

Notice how there are a lot of fibers at one spot, and only a few in others. Notice how most fibers are dark, but others slightly lighter. Notice how some are in focus, while some blurred and pushed to the background.

It was difficult to locate isolated fibers — they were all so caught up in each other — but I managed it. This image is lighter than the others, less congested, more breathable, and I like it.

This is cotton under a microscope, but with the lights turned off. Bizarre and eerie, isn’t it? It has a ghostly energy; the background has the vibe of a typical horror movie. I discovered this completely by accident (my microscope lost power while I was observing) and the results have been spectacular.

This is a grain of rice. I heard somewhere that you never eat the same rice twice, every grain is different, and you should enjoy the uniqueness of each grain as you eat. A wonderful notion, and I had to witness it myself. Turns out you don’t need a microscope to see that each grain is different, but they were a wonderful specimen either way. Sidenote: I can testify that mindfulness while eating is, indeed, magnificent.

Microscopes do curved structures injustice. Compound microscopes only focus on a single, ultra-thin layer. So when looking at a curved structure, you only see a single slice regardless of how well you focus, and everything above and below is blurred out. There has to be a technique to overcome this, I’ll have to figure it out.

A fragment of a grain of rice. Looks like a bullet. Look at the little dark spots, the tiny disfigurations. I like tiny disfigurations; they add character to an object.

Cooked. The image doesn’t do the structure justice at all. It’s barely a white blob. Resembles a mountain from some angles, but I wanted to share it to give you context for the following images.

Again with the light turns off. The eerie, uncanny vibe is back on. I especially like how more details splash out in this dark image than in the light one. You can get a clearer view of the texture; it looks gelatinous. The slimy ghost of a grain of rice.

The yellow shone in this image. Look at the formations at the edges, the ones in focus, and the larger, unfocused blob. Notice, also, the miniscule hairlike structures. What we eat here is almost never pure, and it’s up to us to change that.

All crystals were viewed with a compound, light microscope with an eyepiece magnification of 10x and further magnification of 4x (sometimes 10x), bringing the total magnification to 40x (in most cases).

Back to Tumblr after a long while, I know this'll go over well.

There is hidden detail and richness in almost everything. One way to catch a glimpse of that richness is to observe the objects under a high magnification.

Going straight to the point, here are some arresting images and stacks of various tools, bristles, and a special drawing by yours truly.

Various Tools

The pointy tip of a generic screw. Looks a lot blunter than real life. Look at the metallic structure, the unevenness, how it has been worn and scratched with time. The light, the shadows, the detail, the small thread at the top.

The pointed-end of a small nail. A bit dark, obscure in the shadows, but you can still make out some of the details. The protrusion in the middle, the edges, the bumpiness.

A knob-like protrusion from the surface of a tool. Same old detail, same old intricacy, yet still fascinating.

A single coarse-brush bristle, at 100x magnification. Look at shape, the color, the shadows, the relatively smooth texture, the minute inconsistencies.

No Idea What This Is

The following is glass-like and fascinating. I found a piece of sticky, brown piece of trash on the table while I was working and put it under the microscope out of my infinite curiosity. However, I have no idea what it is. A piece of resin, a food particle?

Very chaotic, translucent, and glass-like. Look at all the tiny fragments, like ice-crystals, and the glazed, fuzzy feeling in them all.

Shattered, but look closely. Are those cracks, like shattered glass? Or bits of thread stuck in the goop? Look at the color, the light filtering through at different intensities at different places. A clear and wonderful shot.

Let’s set an harder challenge this time. Guess what this is and I’ll do a difficult timelapse. Though I can always deny your guess, the image being as obscure as it is.

Pink Bonsai — Or close Enough

Last article, I posted this picture at the end —

— and asked the audience to guess what it could be, setting myself the challenge to draw a microscopic tree if anyone guessed correctly.

Surprise, surprise. My friend guessed it not two seconds after I posted the article. I was not really expecting to draw such a small tree, but a promise is a promise, and @Bopitextreme, here’s your pink bonsai (or generic tree with red leaves, because I have no idea how to draw a bonsai, and I used a pink color pencil but the color registered as red so deal with it I guess).

For reference, this is the space I had for my drawing. This is one, single small-square from a cm-based graph paper. A single small-square.

Pink Bonsai, or close enough. I have no drawing skills to talk about, but anything looks good under a microscope. Just look at the texture, how the pencil strokes register at such a small scale, the white lines interspacing the color. I made the leaves by dotting the pencil repeatedly onto the paper, and it made those marks, those pattern.

Of course, this is one of many versions and trials, and it was tricky to get the texture right on the microscopic scale.

Behind the scenes coming soon, hopefully.

All images were viewed with an optical light microscope at 40x total magnification (Unless otherwise mentioned under the image). Images taken with a midrange phone camera, cropped, and adjusted. The first 7images are focus stacked. Focus stacking was done with Helicon Focus.

I was messing around with my microscope, observing any old thing I could get my hands on, when I plucked a bit of coriander from my parents’ salad. The resulting image might be one of the prettiest things I’ve ever seen.

It’s funny. The world around you is enormous beyond comprehension, formed of units minuscule beyond comprehension, and at all levels, at all scales, all of it, the tiniest of leaves and the vastest of nebulae, is beautiful beyond comprehension.

Today, we admire wet-mounted coriander and a small leaf I plucked from our potted plants.

(I apologize if some of the images are a bit too bright. I’m still learning the ropes of microphotography.)

A dancer’s pose. Bright and elegant, squashed under the coverslip, but still hearty. (40x)

Look at the veins. Look at the granulated greens, the specks that are darker, lusher, with more chlorophyll. Notice the slight fuzz, the curved edges, the vibrancy of it all. (40x)

Look at how cute this is. The wobbling edges, the shape, the bubbles that look like two eyes. Cartoonish and loveable, like a quirky Disney sidekick. But in all honestly, I have no idea what this is. This bubble-like structure formed when I squashed the coriander under the coverslip. My best guess is that a water bubble formed around a mass of fibers. (40x)

Close-up, still cute. The look it’s giving me is so innocent and unhurried. I like to imagine it wants to be my friend and take me on an adventure. I like to imagine it blinking those two flimsy eyes and gently floating towards me, calm, playful, full of life and spirit, unheeding of its fleeting and fragile existence. (100x)

Another fibrous bubble. Again, no idea what it is, but it looks darn cool beside the leaf. (100x)

Zoomed in. Looks weird. Veiny. Notice how the structures pop out, like veins, the spots of pinkish-red scattered about, and the grayness of the rest of it. I like it, but what is it? (400x)

Another leaf. Look at the vibrancy of the colors, look at the scattered pattern of the green. How the darker green is spotted and sprinkled over the lighter background. Look at the vein, like a highway cutting through a lush forest. Look at the light, the greenness, a bit unfocused, yet vital and sprightly. (100x)

End of the leaf. Lighter colors here. I love leaves. We all love leaves. We’ve probably evolved to do so. Look at the shape, the leafiness of the leaf, at how the vein fades into the leaf at the end. Simply Marvelous. (40x)

Stem end. Darker. Veinier. Thicker. Look at how the veins shoot off in different directions, at the symmetry, at the hollow where the stem would have fit. (100x)

All crystals were viewed with a compound, light microscope. Magnifications are listed alongside the pictures. Images were taken with a midrange phone camera and cropped.

Pink salt, also known as Himalayan salt, is a rock salt mined in the Punjab region of Pakistan and is said to have numerous health benefits. More importantly, when the salt is dissolved in water and recrystallized, it forms enthralling structures, as seen under a microscope.

I’ll let you judge for yourself.

Cubic, like Sodium Chloride crystals. It’s wonderful how even and uniform the structures are, chaotic though they sometimes look. Recrystallization is a process where solute (salt, in this case) molecules come out of a solution as the solvent evaporates and adhere to pre-existing crystals (seeds) to form larger crystals. It’s phenomenal that such a process results in such uniform shapes.

Look at the center, it’s hollow. There is an abscess, meaning the crystal did not grow from the inside out. Stupefying. Look at how the layers are stacked on top of each other, the fractures, and the smooth sections.

A chaos of cubes. Several crystals fused to form this jumbled patch. Looks as though I prompted an AI and it overdid the details. Look at the sheer complexity, intricacy, and detail. There is so much going on in nature that it’s beyond us, even, to fully grasp and appreciate something so minuscule it’s basically dust.

You can get lost in this field of crystals. Try it. It’s awesome.

Those structures look like pyramids viewed from the bird’s eye — or is that just me?

A greater magnification. Look at the shadow, at the symbol it represents, and the white cross it incidentally forms. I don’t know why nature arranges itself into uniform, repetitive, predictable patterns, but I am grateful that it does.

This is at a 400x magnification, ten times greater than the rest of the images. A tiny blade-end of a crystal, barely visible in the unfocused fog, growing from what looks like a string.

Is there a red fabric shedding thread in my room? Almost all my crystals have had some amount of red thread in them as impurities. I’ve already stated my views on impurities — wildly positive. I believe the string enhances the quality of the images, rather than disrupting them. Furthermore, this is one of the most convoluted crystals yet, the recrystallization process must have been tumultuous.

A small, fractured piece, floating freely by itself, just a little ways off from a (comparatively) behemoth mass.

All crystals were viewed with a compound, light microscope with an eyepiece magnification of 10x and further magnification of 4x (sometimes 10x and once 40x), bringing the total magnification to 40x in most cases; and 100x and 400x for one or two images.

We all love foam. It’s soft, fun to play with, and keeps our delicate belongings safe. Turns out, the structure of foam is miraculous once viewed under a microscope. This makes sense: foam is a fibrous matrix of interconnected tissues that is bound to be intricate and captivating at the microscopic level (and isn’t something I discovered completely by accident because I was out of crystals and was trying everything I could get my hands on).

So, ladies and gentlemen, foam, red and white.

So fragile-looking, so thin, so delicate. As if they’d crumple under the slightest touch. Which is true, they do. But together, with each of the fibers holding the other up, they are surprisingly resilient and possess a (relatively) high tensile strength.

A greater magnification. Hazy, as if the background is sheathed in fog. The microscopic ends stick out like the sharp blades of snowflakes. And the white, unfocused void, well, that is something I’m not ready to tackle yet.

A little closer up. See how some fibers reach out and interconnect into pentagons or hexagons. Notice how others only reach into minuscule oblivion, their ends sticking out. Yearning, perhaps, for a connection, or for an old junction long ripped apart.

I love repeating structures. The walls are almost hexagonal. The fibers light, thin, and interconnected. Almost representing bubbles or froth. Maybe a hive, or a zoomed-out, black-and-white image of a brain, the neural circuits and synapses a chaotic jumble, yet at the same time possessing a natural symmetry. Notice also the blurred structures in the background. This same image repeated layer after layer throughout the entirety of the foam, but the microscope could only focus on one layer at a time.

This is from a piece of red, packaging foam, pretty tough to the touch. My first thought was red onion cells, but it feels more akin to human tissue. Red-tinted. Thin and flimsy to the point of transparency. Delicate, yet possessing a sort of wafery complexity.

Wonderful, vivid, elegant, and red. Look at the tiny, fluttering lines, the fibers, the curvatures, and the overlapping layers. Look at the delicacy, the vibrancy of the color, and how the light filters through the bottom. Zoom in to see the tiny inconsistencies between the cells, bits of dust, probably, but who knows what exactly is trapped between those folds?

Newton's rings put on a microscopic show.