Smart Microscope

Most of the popular digital and DSLR cameras are perfectly equipped for macro photos. Taking a great photo by zooming to the scene no farther than 20-30 centimeters is a little effort and requires only clicking the shutter button and leaving all the technicalities to the camera's automated software. Even the cheap lenses can do that without a problem. A while ago I collected some of those photos and wrote a little about macro photography and how to record all the close objects not very distant from our nose.

But can we do closer than that? Can we take a photo of an object like the top of a pencil as close as a couple of millimeters away from the lens, for example, like the one in this photo:

Dot-sized larvae of cricket or grasshopper invading our balcony flowerpot

Well, not with a consumer camera, not without specialized optics. However, "augmenting" our smartphones to do the magic is just a little effort. And yes, I took the above photo with only my smartphone, an additional plastic lens I taped to its camera, and... lots of patience.

To be completely honest, taking a photo of an insect, small in size, like a hair louse that is erratically running and jumping in your small zooming window, is not little effort per se, but it can make your day and everything else is just a piece of cake. All you have to do is strip one of those laser pointers and rip out its lens. Perhaps the better results you can get are with a laser pointer equipped with a lens made with greater optical quality, but for starters, anyone can do it. So, like in the left image, or if you click on the bottom reference link, when you take out the lens, all you have to do is tape it to your camera lens on the back of your smartphone, and the rest is your imagination. If you follow the image story, the goal can be even bigger—the end result can be one of those microscopes you can find in toy stores with quality lenses, capable of taking a photo or even a video clip of a microworld with up to the cellular level. Complete instructions on building such a device you can find within the Turn Your Smartphone Into a Digital Microscope! YouTube page.

Of course, taking microphotos means you have to get close to the scene, and your smartphone will block most of the useful light, so you have to think like an ordinary microscope. You bring the light with you and position it just below or next to the "set". I recommend one of those LED flashlights that are very small in size that allows you to carry them along with your phone. I used one of those book reader LED lights with a flexible handle with just one LED source on the top. That way you can fit both in your hand—the light and the phone. The other hand will be responsible just for zooming and the button. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is how it looks in action.

I didn't play too much time with this, but I am sure the following summer will bring lots of more microphotos when all of that microbiological life emerges, but it is amazing what exactly you can stumble upon in your front yard or balcony in just a couple of hours. In the image below to the right, when I pointed the lens toward the rose's stem, I thought I would get only some sort of reddish plant spores, but instead my memory card was filled with tiny and not too adorable rose lice. In other words, if you make this, prepare to be surprised at what exactly you might find in there.

Therefore, I advise practicing first with non-live objects in your own household, like in the above example of pencil tops, and believe me, exercising is what you really need to do, simply because zooming out of focus is just one tiny move of your finger or even a significant breath or hesitation. Anyway, I will be adding more images to this gallery in the future, and besides the embedded images in this post, there are more in the web gallery.

In today's update, the story goes further into the microworld, and this time with a cheap 'consumer' digital microscope. I bought one for Viktor's 11th birthday earlier this year, and during this entire spring we played with it a lot. In quality and zooming, it was more or less in the realm of the DIY smart microscope I made and described in the post. However, it brought to the scene its own powerful LED lights, and with its pencil-like shape, it was more controllable and applicable. The downside was that it was far beyond smartphone camera quality, and the number of pixels was not too high to capture quality videos, but still, its educational value was out of the question.

This new addition to the post imagery was actually a video from Viktor's YouTube channel, zViktor22, where he tested the microscope with various plants, food, money, fabrics, insects, and more from our country village, household, his 5th grade herbarium, and our front yard. I also included our old smart microscope photos and the caterpillar video from the initial post to complete the story about what it's possible to do with little effort and cheap technology.

Original post: May 2014, Update: June 2018.

Smart Microscope:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TNng7utQTw1zb3GK8

History of (d)SLR

The year was 1975 when I was browsing a small dusty workshop located next to the garage in our backyard. It was a perfect combination; I was about to turn 7 years old, eager to explore the darkest corner of my childhood realm, and the dark workshop was the most mysterious chamber in our entire family estate, no bigger than four cubic meters, occupied by a heavy and old greenish oak cabinet with a couple of drawers and compartments filled with tons of different tools, mechanical devices, and various interesting stuff whose origin and purpose I didn't know. It was, more or less, the year when I started to break things in order to find out what was inside or to find out how something works, foolishly believing that I would be perfectly able to put things back together.

Well, from this point of view in time, I can't remember if there was at least one mechanical device I "inspected" in such a manner that I successfully restored after unscrewing all the bolts and junctures or by simply breaking the metal hood. One thing is for sure, though. What I found that summer morning in the workshop I definitely never managed to restore. I simply succeeded in dismantling the old thing beyond any possibility for repair. But the knowledge I gained from what I found inside was priceless. It was something I had never seen before. When I broke the hard metal hood of an old binocular I found hidden in one old bag stored in the old oak, at first glance I thought I had found a treasure. Two shiny, perfectly aligned, and beautifully shaped objects smiled at me from the inside of the optical instrument. I was too young to understand what their purpose was, but in the following days I learned everything about it. That very day I discovered a prism. Two of them.

Needless to say, I instantly became attached to my newest discovery to the point that I kept them with me all the time. I was carrying them to the school and bragging about their almost magical abilities of bending light in different directions. Well, I wasn't any different from any other kid at that age. Only in this case with a little twist. Guess what the twist is? I still have one of them (above photo).

Leica IIIa, rangefinder camera, 1935-38 (responsible for the kiss photo**)

After almost 40 years, one prism survived and is more or less in the expected shape after four decades, still playing with photons the same as years before. But this is not the end of the story about this particular prism. The history of the little thing goes even more into the past. Actually this binocular belonged to my grandfather, who brought it directly from World War II. Some 30 years before I found it hidden in an old cabinet, my grandfather was experiencing the final year of his captivity in one of those German camps for military personnel imprisoned back in the year of 1941. After German capitulation, he was traveling half of Europe on foot, trying to find his way home, carrying these binoculars with him. Sometimes, I wonder what exactly little prism saw in these turbulent years, changing who knows how many owners during the war, and how many untold stories are lost forever and hidden in little crystals now perhaps more than 80 years old.

But to get back to the title story, basically the technology behind the acronym is connected to the camera's solution of how the photographer's eye is monitoring the shooting object. In the history of photo cameras, way back in the 19th century, the first professional cameras were designed with two objective lenses, perfectly aligned and with the same focal length, one for taking the light to the photographic film and the other toward the viewfinder. The single-lens system was a natural step forward, where a mirror-prism system mounted between the lens and film forced light to make a couple of sharp turns and to end directly at the viewfinder. The result is obvious: the framed image shown in front of your eye is the one forming the final picture after the mirror is lifted up and the photographic film is lit during the desired exposure time. What is also obvious is that the more quality the objective lens, mirror, pentaprism, and eyepiece are manufactured with, the better the image you see in the viewfinder before the final moment of triggering the shutter mechanism. The other non-optical part of analog-era SLR photo cameras directly responsible for the quality of the final product is, of course, the sensitivity of photographic film as well as the quality of embedded microscopically small light-sensitive silver-based crystals responsible for the contrast and resolution of the film. Back then, in the analog era, the photographing process didn't end by clicking the button. The film needed to be chemically developed, and with another optical/chemical process of illumination, the negative taken images are finally transferred to the photo paper.

If you were a photo enthusiast back in the seventies and eighties of the previous century like my father was, you might imagine that having a proper camera along with a photo laboratory with a darkroom was not a very cheap hobby. But thousands of images were worth all the effort. My favorite memories from those days were all connected to spending hours in a dark photo room with a red light producing pictures on paper. The moment of the image appearing on the surface of photo paper submerged in a dilute solution, followed by washing the photograph with fixer liquid and water, was my favorite part. I was typically in charge of these final steps in the process along with hanging wet photos for final drying. In this part of Europe in those times, the best amateurish and semi-professional cameras and all the equipment needed for a photo laboratory for hobbyists, with all the chemicals and supporting devices, came from East Germany and Russia. My father owned a couple of those-day cameras, and the one I remember the most was the Zenit E/EM (pictured to the left), manufactured a couple of years before the Olympics in Moscow in 1980. Zenit was made by KMZ (Красногорский завод), a leading Russian enterprise in the area of optical and electro-optical engineering, and you would be amazed how nice photos this little fellow made 25-30 years ago.

In conclusion, after a little history and technicalities, in the final chapter of this blog post, let's talk a little about digital SRLs. Basically, optical systems used in old cameras are the same. Two things changed, though. The quality of manufacturing of all optical parts in nowadays photo cameras is far more advanced than before, and all aspects of the final image are increased to the edge. There is a software term in the early digital era called WYSIWYG, meaning "What You See Is What You Get", which initially referred to printing documents looking the same as seen on the display of your computer. I guess the photo industry today reached the same goal, and with not even too expensive lenses and moderate DSLR cameras, final photos reached the quality of the image appearing in viewfinders or the one seen with your naked eye. The second major change is in the simple fact that all the chemical industry and paper photos are replaced by pure digital systems. Film is removed by a light sensor in the form of an electronic chip filled with a matrix of millions of tiny analog-to-digital converter dots capable of instantly saving an image into a fast memory card. Perhaps the third change is the fact that each DSLR device today is also a specialized computer, and compared to old systems, they are now able to perform various post-processing procedures to assist you with intelligent zooming, face recognition, adapting to shooting conditions, filming entire video clips, and maintaining a detailed database of taken images.

Nikon D5200 dSLR and Zenit EM SLR*

Considering all the features of one DSLR, I can surely say that this one device replaces my father's entire environment, from the camera through the darkroom for developing photographs to the bulk photo albums where final photos are stored. And all that with a smaller price, and what's more important, with far more space for creativity and for taking photos in a professional manner. To me, today's worldwide market is taken by two big players, Canon and Nikon, Japanese multinational corporations, both specialized in the manufacture of imaging and optical products, especially in the market of digital SLR cameras. It wasn't easy to choose one of their models, and I took several days of browsing stores and reading about all the specifications, but I eventually chose the Nikon D5200 that fits all the requests and budget I had in my mind.

At the very end let's speculate a little about how the future of photo cameras might look. Will it be further development and improvement in optical and digital systems or with the upcoming ultimate speed of future computer circuits or with the introduced quantum computers that the digital system will "evolve back" to the analog world? It remains to be seen. One thing is for sure though: miniaturization of optical systems is still not possible by the simple fact that the more photons you get in the sensor, the better the image is saved, and in this case, size really matters.

Ref:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/viewfinders.shtml

*
http://www.theothermartintaylor.com/moveabletype/archives/cameras/000005.html
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/dslr-cameras/d5200.html

**
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2313418/Times-Square-kiss

Πάργα

In our part of the world summer vacation is the most important one for most people. There are several reasons for this, and probably the major one is that during July and August in this part of the western Balkans, where we live, temperatures can go as high as 45°C (113°F), and the obvious solution is to pack your bags, jump into the car, and go to one of four nearby seas for a couple of weeks to cool off and enjoy (and also to change the everyday scenery and recharge your inner batteries, which are always seriously depleted when summers come).

Due to the shortest distance and good roads, Greece is probably the best destination for a car trip to the seaside that takes less than 10 hours of driving. Unfortunately this is one of few routes for all those "gastarbeiter" people who mainly work in Germany and other western countries and during summers form very long rivers of vehicles toward their home destinations in Turkey and other countries. When they hit borders along the way, this is a nightmare you want to avoid. Once we had bad luck and got stuck in one of 7 lanes between the Serbian and Macedonian (FYROM) borders and waited 4 hours to pass through. This is why we always travel halfway during the night and cross the borders around dawn or so to avoid crossing peaks and giant waiting times. The return way is always smoother, and we mainly use borders for rest and shopping. Like I already wrote in the post Aegean Sea before, short car destinations in Greece are all connected to the Aegean Sea, but this time we chose to check out the Ionian basin and try the relatively new motorway the Greeks built not so long ago. Only once I spent vacation in this part of Greece, and I remember it was a hard job for my father, as the curvy road from the Aegean to the Ionian Sea included one mountain after another, and driving through them required full concentration all the way with frequent resting points. Today, this is a different story with the new modern freeway, and the same destination is now reachable within 3 hours or so. Believe it or not, this new route includes about 60 tunnels almost 50 km long combined, and during summer heat, driving through all the tunnels comes extra handy and relaxing.

Since this was the first time for me driving this road, I decided to use a little help from modern GPS navigation. It was only needed for the last hour of the trip, where we needed to leave the motorway and find our way to the final destination in Parga, a small and old town located some 40 km south of Igoumenitsa port across the Corfu island. I didn't have any specialized GPS car devices before, and I decided to risk it a little and use the smartphone instead. I bought cheap navigation software called "Navi Ninasus" despite not so many recommendations online. To my surprise, it handled all the situations extremely well and pointed us exactly to the front gate of our villa without any problems. Rerouting was perfect and fast, and it proves very well on the ship and on foot as well. You can see it in action in the photos below, and if you want to save some serious money in the big GPS market, this one is a very good solution.

When we visited our travel agency (Big Star Niš) and told them that we decided to go to Parga this year, Stefan, one of the agency owners, while describing the house we wanted to hire, said something about a nearby olive forest that looks exactly like the scenery from "The Lord of the Rings", a fantasy trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien's famous book. Of course, I was a little skeptical about this but at the same time very curious to explore. The moment of our arrival, when I first saw the large olive tree just above our villa, I was eager to go to the forest as soon as possible. So we did the very next day, and if you look at the next couple of photos from the woods when we made a shortcut our way to the Lichnos beach, I am sure that, like me, you will agree that old olive trees are something special to see, and to tell you the truth, if Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf jumped out of some tree, I wouldn't be surprised at all. My only regret is that we didn't hit the time when olives are being collected with large nets villagers are using for this purpose. I am sure this would be something worthwhile to see. Needless to say, our landlady on our last day gave us a bottle of olive oil as a present, made exactly from the olives collected right from the woods we saw and photographed, and with this blog post I thank her for all her hospitality and kindness. The same level of gratitude goes to Stefan and "Big Star", which is one of the best travel agencies in Niš.

Perhaps to better feel and, in this case, hear the forest, I took a couple of seconds-long video clip showing all the beauty of old olives:

According to a couple of wikis I read, I learned that Pargians are descendants from the old Greek tribe called Thesprotians. Perhaps the best-known resident in ancient times was Odysseus himself, who married Thesprotia's queen of the time by the name Kallidike and spent many years in this area leading the tribe and fighting many wars as their king. Unfortunately, if we leave mythology aside, real history for Pargians was not so cheerful, especially much later in the Dark Ages when these people shared violent times with the active neighborhood. They survived different rulers and occupations starting with Normans, Venetians, French, British, and Ottomans, not to mention constant attacks from various pirates from the sea. Today, the monumental fortress built for their defense is the sour witness of the old times, standing above the small town for centuries. In the town below, old narrow stone streets, similar to those of Corfu, are now wonderful tourist attractions, along with four beaches, all very different in nature and appearance. Surrounded by large hills and dense forests, Parga today is one of the few real tourist paradises during summer, filled with voices of dozens of different languages, especially at night when it is not easy to find an empty chair in local tavernas. In addition to Parga's social life, to me, Greek vacations are always more about reading books and enjoying peaceful moments. This time I brought "The Lost Symbol" and swallowed it in just a couple of days. If you want to learn something more about worldwide Freemasonry, this is the book for you, especially if you are, like me, a big fan of Robert Langdon's adventures. We had a large garden in front of the house with a big stone table where, below the shadows of lemon leaves, reading Dan Brown's book got additional pleasure. On the other hand, for Viktor no summer vacation can pass without his tablet and a couple of video games (picture to the right).

Just 20 km offshore, there are two small islands called Paxos and Antipaxos. According to the legend, Poseidon himself used his mighty trident and sliced the southern part of Corfu, making this small archipelago paradise just for him and his wife, Amphitrite, to enjoy some peace and quiet. Compared to nowadays worldwide religions, I really love Greek mythology and their amazing stories. I mean, come on, if you are creating a mass of fairy tales, using wild imagination is a must, and ancient Greeks did it very well. Of all religions in existence today and those extinguished in the past, Greek former beliefs are probably the best in the history of mankind. Anyway, there are many boats sailing to the Paxoi Islands every morning, providing a one-of-a-kind experience of swimming in the same waters where Poseidon enjoyed his time with his wife alone on the beach. A small boat even entered one of the sea caves, providing a unique feeling for us, but the best was the moment when one of the boats turned loudspeakers toward the cave and played James Brown's famous song "I Feel Good". The echo from the cave provided a sound effect I had never heard before. Don't miss this trip if you are spending vacation in Parga or Gaios, the main town of Paxos Island, where we enjoyed "Τσιπούρα" delicious Mediterranean fish with teeth.

The second boat trip was a ship cruise to Corfu and the island of Vido (Greek: Βίδο), a special place for Serbian history where more than 5000 Serbian soldiers were buried at sea. At the beginning of World War I, the whole Serbian army was forced to retreat by the major offensive by Austrian and Bulgarian armies. In just two years of war, the Serbian army declined from 420,000 to the number of 150,000, ending on the island of Corfu with the help of Allied forces' ships. Those who didn't survive harsh wintertime during the long walk over Albania's mountains were buried on the island of Vido, and those who couldn't find empty burial space on the island were just buried in the sea near the island. This very spot where they are buried is called Blue Sea Tomb, and there is now an almost hundred-year-old poem, "Ode to a Blue Sea Tomb", describing the pain and suffering of the Serbian people and soldiers during WWI. I simply wrote "History is sometimes painful" in the book in the memorial. And I meant not only Serbian history. For more about our trip to Corfu, please read the post Streets of Corfu, where I experienced a a unique kind of déjà vu that I tried to describe there. Following are photos from Corfu and Vido, and the second image is of the Serbian House at 19 Moustoxidou Street, which is one great museum dedicated to the WWI events.

But life is always going on, and history is there to remind us of our failures and our brightest moments. We should use it to learn from it, but honestly speaking, I have that feeling that humans have a long way to go in order to start avoiding mistakes and stop repeating violent behavior from the past.

Well, this post is also a photo collection from the vacation, and now is the time to choose the best photo taken. Of course this is subjective business, but if you ask me, the honor goes to my wife, who took the opening photo of this post. I am sure for some of you this would be just a bunch of rocks on the shore, but for me this is the perfect example of accidental photography and Pareidolia. My wife actually just wanted to take a photo of the rocky formation from the taxi boat when we were returning from the beach to Parga, but after we saw it on the big screen, from this angle, it looked amazingly like a giant prehistoric fish or sea dinosaur with a large fin or flapper on its back.

Needless to say, we all fully recommend Parga and the Ionian Sea for summer vacation. I am sure we will be returning here in the future, maybe next time to northern Corfu or one of the southern Ionian islands.

Streets of Corfu

Long ago I started to experience that one extremely memorable dream. One of those that doesn't fade out with the first morning sunshine. Instead, it was regularly popping to the surface of my mind, making me wonder if these vivid images, haunting me every now and again, were just a product of my imagination or perhaps there was something more hidden beneath. In the dream I wander the narrow streets of an unknown city, one after another, and after a while I stumble to the big square with large monumental buildings decorated with dark reddish bricks with no signs or any familiar markings I can recognize. I was always wondering where all these colorful images originated from and somehow always had that feeling that I am probably missing an important link to fully understand the whole picture.

Recently this final link suddenly appeared, and during our vacation last week I accidentally found my dream site, and all missing pieces finally placed together, forming a memory almost 40 years old. Somehow, subconsciously, I have always known that it wasn't the dream at all and all the streets and buildings were very real and instead represent one of those almost forgotten recollections hidden deeply in my memory banks. What I saw in my night vision was the lost memory of the city of Corfu.

It all happened when I was the age of my son today. I was about 7 years old when my parents chose to spend vacation on the island of Corfu in the northern part of the Ionian Sea, just about 100 km away from the southern cape of the famous heel of the Italian peninsula. While waiting for the ferry in the early morning, we took a walk to the empty streets of Corfu (Greek: Κέρκυρα), the main city named after the island itself, and what was once one small walk under the morning sunshine now is just one almost faded memory for some reason refusing to die and from time to time reminding me of a beautiful site I experienced so long ago.

A couple of days ago, almost four decades after my last encounter with the island, I decided to take my wife and son on the tourist cruise to Corfu. The ship was medium-sized and filled with approximately 300 people of different nationalities and a not-so-small group of Serbian tourists. During the final two years of World War I, the island of Corfu served as a refuge for the Serbian army that retreated there on Allied forces' ships. More than 150,000 soldiers, royal government officials, and civilians established Serbian administration in exile during 1916-1918, while in Serbia under occupation of Austrian and Bulgarian armies, only women, children, and old men stayed. We started browsing the city in the street of Moustoxidou, where next to the French Consular Agency lies the honorary Consulate of Serbia, or simply the Serbian House, the museum completely dedicated to the WWI events that happened on the island and the island of Vido (Greek: Βίδο) across the harbor (first three images above).

The center of the city is a labyrinth of narrow streets, and it requires great orientation skills to remember where you are or where you were in order to find the place of interest. While we waited in front of Sorbonne's office of the French consular building, I got the idea to use the extremely elongated portrait size of the 16:9 aspect ratio of the digital format and start taking photos of small stone alleys. Generally I don't like this format compared to its landscape counterpart just because the image looks too narrow in the vertical direction, but in the case of the streets of Corfu, I could say this is an ideal combination. We didn't have much time until the ship departure time, so I chose the "Scene Selector" feature on my Coolpix camera (which is a somewhat improved automated mode in Nikon's software for digital cameras) and started clicking at the beginning of each street we crossed. After little post-processing (mostly minor changes in brightness, contrast, and sharpness), this blog post is the result. I included on this page 36 images of beautiful small and narrow streets, all taken in the center of Corfu.

When I was 7ish years old, I was a lot smaller, streets were empty, and everything looked large to me. This is probably why I remembered the whole site and its mystical appearance in the early hours. Especially when we stumbled upon big city hall with loud church bells echoing through the streets. Today tourism changed the scenery a lot, and streets are full of various stores, coffee shops, and restaurants. Compared to the 70s, now walking the colorful streets full of people and friendly salesmen brought a familiar environment of other Greek towns. However, the unusual city's topography, with up and downhill streets oriented in all directions, provides Corfu with little authentic feeling and a small glimpse of the old times when civilization was still knocking on the doors of all Greek coastal towns. My wife chose some small, authentic Greek tavern run by an old couple where we experienced even further travel to the past, where traditional Greek hospitality was still not influenced by modern times and Wi-Fi hotspots and where time flowed much slower.

Our free time in Corfu was between 2 and 4 PM, and photographing empty streets or scenery was mission impossible. Still, I managed to find a couple of empty streets and alleys or ones with not too many people inside. These photos (in the above last segments) ended probably the best, showing Corfu's special mixture of Venetian, British, Italian, Greek, and Byzantine architecture that mainly originated in the 18th and 19th centuries.

At the very end of this special photo story, I can only recommend this part of the Balkans highly, along with Parga—a small town where we settled for 10 days in a family villa next to an amazing olive-tree forest. I am sure this part of western Greece hides many more interesting places to visit and photograph. If you add the crystal-clear waters of the Ionian Sea and friendly faces wherever you look, I am sure spending just one vacation on the island is way too little time. I will definitely come here again in the future, and this time I am not going to let new memories fade again to the point of haunting dreams like before. I have to say, though, that when I was walking the same streets again after a long time, I didn't experience the typical déjà vu feeling like I described in the blog post last year. Even though there were some glimpses that looked familiar, too much time passed, and I guess I wasn't able to recognize exact spots and views, probably due to the fact that children and adults experience events and scenery differently, and not just because of different points of view but also because a child's mind is a lot emptier, and they simply don't have much data to compare with, especially if they are experiencing something for the first time. Nevertheless, the whole experience with my lost memory was at least unusually unique, and I doubt I would encounter many more like it.

Streets of Corfu (Full Photo Album):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TLw83qgV8ZmMe1Gi8

Parga:
https://www.mpj.one/2013/08/parga.html
https://photos.app.goo.gl/vSM1DFFafrfvMxU96

Corfu (Wiki and Web):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vido
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Campaign_(World_War_I)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serbs_Corfu1916-1918.jpg
http://www.greeka.com/ionian/corfu/corfu-architecture.htm
http://www.pargagreece.co.uk/