Under the Microscope: Spirogyra • Travis Hale (Photography and Science)

About:

This episode of Under the microscope focusses on “Spirogyra“, more commonly known as Water Silk, and Blanket Weed which is a “filamentous charophyte green algae”. In simpler terms it a grouping of freshwater green algae, whilst the name Spiro is due to the helical or spiral arrangements of the chloroplasts.

There are some 400 species of Spirogyra in the world, and it is common in relatively bioactive pond waters etc. There is far more information available on this topic on Wikipedia and across the internet.

How it was taken:

All of my “under the microscope” images are taken in a similar manner, and using the below equipment. In this case, focus stacking was conducted by capturing a video of the subject as I move through the planes of focus, and then software pulled the images out of that video and focus stacked them into the images below;