Taking Daphnia

I took some shots of some “water fleas” or Daphnia on Sunday.

I purchased some live Daphnia from a local aquarium centre for the whopping sum of 99p.  I then extracted one of the Daphnia with a pipet in a tiny water drop and then placed it on a microscope slide.  To stop the water from running off the slide, I had previously created a small circle on it using water sealant, so as to create a kind of well on the slide.

I mounted my MPE-65mm on my velbon super-mag slider focusing rail, then placed the slide in the arm of a Wimberley clamp, then adjusted the focus.  I ended up taking the shots of the daphnia at around 2.5x magnification on the lens.

I found that the MT-24ex flash heads were creating a bounce back from the slide when mounted on the lens.  To get round this I set the camera’s timer to a 10 second delay, allowing me to hold the flash lamps to the side of the slide and slightly below to get rid of this uncomplementry flash effect.

The resulting image was then cleaned up of water partical dust specs and can be seen below.  The F rating used was F9.  Flash to 1/8th power on both heads with Sto-Fen diffusers.