What is the lowest budget to get started with Photomicrography? I
have a digital camera and I think I can attach that to some of the
microscopes. What is needed to take photos like Dennis Kunkel
(
http://www.denniskunkel.com/ )
An electron microscope. AFAI can see all those images are artifically colored electron microscope shots (electron microscope images are originally in grayscale). Electron microscopes are basically out of the reach of a private person - they're not just incredibly bulky and expensive to buy, but also incredibly expensive to set up and run.
or some of the shots in Nikon Small
World Contest (
http://www.microscopyu.com/smallworld/ )
The person who selected those images did like color... Most the images are either fluorescense images (the specimen is stained with fluorescent substances) or various variants of phase or interference contrast.
Fluorescense is quite advanced and probably not something you want to do, but decent used microscopes with phase contrast can be had for, oh, $500 upwards.
Even cheaper but still producing pretty results is darkfield microscopy. Most any microscope can be converted into taking darkfield (instead of brightfield) images. For some examples of excellent brightfield & darkfield photos taken with relatively low-cost equipment see:
http://reefcentral.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=e5cf2f268148e1bd9a5d81d976b9b0c2&threadid=134636
You should also consider what you want to shoot. Do you want to shoot single-celled or multicelled animals? If you want to shoot, say, insects, then you really want a stereo microscope rather than a compound microscope. Stereos are cheaper and give a 3 dimensional image, and since they use incident rather than transmitted light you can observe opaque objects. Such as, say, a live housefly. I've found that those are the kinds of pictures I'm mostly interested in taking - compound microscopy doesn't interest me as much, and I know a lot more about taking stereo microscope shots than compound microscope shots.
Here's some images I've taken with a stereo microscope and a Coolpix 4500.
http://www.pbase.com/mike_noren/mikes_pix
The animals on the picture range from about 0.1mm (the diatoms) to about 10mm (the Gammarus shrimp).
A decent used stereo microscope from, say, Olympus, will set you back from about $300.
As for adapter, I use an adapter from
http://www.microscopy-uk.com/ which works well with both stereo and compound microscopes. I believe that adapter cost about $150, but there are cheaper alternatives such as building your own adapter or merely using a tripod to shoot through the microscope eyepiece.
Do I need to have an expensive "scanning electron microscope" or is
it enough to puchase an inexpensive, 100-300 USD microscope with
some light equipment? I am more than happy if some of you can
provide some additional info and useful links to get started!
Unfortunately it is so with microscopes that quality and price are intimately connected. The images in the sites you referred to were taken with microscopes costing from, at a guess, about $5000 up to perhaps $250000, frequently with dedicated microscope cameras costing almost as much again. Even ignoring the obvious talent of some of the photographers those images will be difficult to beat because of the advanced technology used.
However, microscopes are built to last, and used microscopes are therefore often in good shape & fairly affordable, and eyepiece adapters can be found reasonably cheap for most cameras. A good place to find info is:
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/
There are also various other sources on the net.
