Small prints (really small)

[Alpacaman]

I was fiddling around with an old Leitz microscope today, using some old slides of my father's to get my grips on the instrument. Some of the slides were fairly standard - a flea, a diatom, largely what you would expect for a microscope. Aside from the specimens, however, many of the slides were prints!?

Very small black and white prints, measuring maybe 1.5-2mm each side. One of the Royal Family, dated 1847, had a photograph of good old Queen Victoria and the hubby Albert. Another was of a Lord Beaconsfield - Benjamin Disraeli. One was of an American river steamer, and another was a reproduction of a painting of judgement day.

How kitschy! And bizarre! 😱

Looking at these things down the barrel of a microscope, along side a mote of dust that just blew in is very strange. The naked eye can make out a rectangle of pigment, but nothing more really. Under the lower power objectives the photos are quite clear, this gives way to grain under higher powers.

Additionally, one of the slides was of the Lord's Prayer cut into glass with a diamond, measuring maybe 2 millimetres on each side. Not related to this, but interesting nonetheless.

I would like to post photos, but I don't have any way of mounting a camera to the microscope.

Anyway: how did the Victorians do it? Print so small? Wikipedia has some info ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphotograph ), but I'm still quite puzzled. Still, this is an excellent way of saving on darkroom chemicals 😎

 

[__jc]

Sounds intriguing - would really like to see some if you figure out a way to photograph them.

And, yeah, how DID they do that?

 

[Alpacaman]

I ended up using a point and shoot down the barrel of the microscope to take photos of the slides, I'll split them across a few posts:

 

[Alpacaman]

 

[Alpacaman]

 

[dfatty]

no idea how they did it, but that's really cool!

 

[Alpacaman]

 

[__jc]

These are extraordinary! Thank you for figuring out a way to photograph them Alpacaman.

The Victorians seemed to excel in bizarre pastimes and fads!

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

These micrographs were very popular, particularly among the newly affluent middle classes of Western and Central Europe, around the end of the 19th century but the earliest examples date right back to the 1830s. Try looking up John Dancer, who was probably the first person to make such tiny images.

 

[rbiemer]

These seem like they would be related to "Stanhope" images. Those are tiny images that one could see without a microscope.
I was a little surprised to find a company still making them:
http://www.stanhopemicroworks.com/STANHOPES-The-World-in-Miniature_ep_47.html

They are using "a proprietary process" so likely won't have much to share about how they're made...

Very cool, thanks for sharing these!
Rob

 

[JoeV]

Huh. So these aren't "full-frame," are they? 🙂

~Joe

 

[froyd]

Fascinating. The tonal range does suffer though, doesn't it? 😛