Weds January 18, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

Speaker: Professor Brian Matsumoto

Abstract: Digital Photomicrography,  New Technology, and Its Application to Microscopy. 
Tonight’s presentation is on using modern interchangeable cameras and software for taking images with the microscope. We will discuss the types of cameras available to the microscopist as well as some of the operational controls needed to take photomicrographs. Camera software commands, such as histogram display, peaking, highlight detection, and shutter setting will be described. We will review the guidelines to be used in selecting the camera for different tasks as well as presenting a simple equation for determining the pixel size and magnification needed to record the full resolution of your lenses. Finally, we will describe software and how you can use Photoshop’s layers to reduce the effects of noise when working with high ISOs. The topics are a synopsis of our new book, An Introduction to Digital Photomicrography from Crowood Press. This book is scheduled for release in April 2017.

As a reminder, the second half of our meetings are available for members to present their own contributions.  If you have a brief subject of interested you would like to present, the second half is usually available for that purpose. 

A Short Educational talk by Alan deHaas:
Alan will bring in his Fuji x-e1 with adapters and lenses. He will share some of his extensive knowledge on  macro and very macro work. This should be of great interest to our members as all have at one point needed techniques for high resolution macro work. 

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Weds, February 15, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville.Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

Speaker: Tom Jones  
  
Abstract:
This will be a further examination of methods in photomicrography, following on Brian Matsumoto's presentation last month on Digital Photomicrography. We will look at some historical methods of photographing through the microscope, including cameras and coupling methods. Current camera coupling methods will be examined next, with an emphasis on choosing appropriate projection methods for various camera sensor sizes, and differences between fixed focal length and infinity systems. Since photomicrography normally results in images without any size reference, we will also look at how to create reference scale bars for inclusion in both still and video digital images.

The rest of the presentation will deal primarily with video photomicrography, and the benefits and complications it adds to a project. We will see a few short demonstration videos, followed by an overview of some of the methods and options available to produce and edit video files in Adobe Premiere Pro. These will include a little bit about shooting and formats, note taking, collating files, basic editing, using captions, titles and scale bars, color correction, and a few useful special effects. We will also look at finding and choosing music, adding it to your video, and uploading the finished project to YouTube.

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Weds March 15, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

Speaker: Mark Rentz:

Abstract:
The primary lenses for the microscope and the camera are the objective and the camera lens, respectively.  Other than both using a multitude of carefully polished glass lens elements, there does not appear to be much in common between the two.  However, when one recognizes the equivalence between the camera sensor plane and the microscope specimen plane these two optical systems actually share many design and performance features. 

This talk will look at such parameters as focal length and aperture, and discuss how they are the same, but not quite, with microscopes and cameras.  We will show that it is possible to use a camera lens as a microscope objective and present some photos as proof.

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Weds April 19, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

Speaker: David K. Lynch

Abstract: Color and Light in Nature
What is a rainbow? How many are there? Why is the sky blue? Why is the setting sun red and flattened? What is a mirage? Why are there rays or spokes coming from the setting sun? What is the green flash? Can it be photographed? Why does the moon look so big on the horizon? Why do stars twinkle? What is an aurora borealis? Is it really darkest before dawn? Why are wet spots dark? What is that ring around the Sun? Why can water appear so many different colors? These and dozens of other questions about naturally occurring optical effects are explained with pictures and diagrams, along with tips on how to see and photograph them. Authors David K. Lynch and William Livingston are astronomers.

David Knight Lynch received a B.S. in Astrophysics in 1969 from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1975 from the University of Texas in Austin. He specializes in infrared spectroscopy of comets, novae, supernovae, young stars and very old stars. Dave also works in the field of optics in nature (rainbows, mirages, etc.) and geologic mapping. Dave has held research positions at the University of Texas, Sacramento Peak Observatory, Caltech, UC/Berkeley, Hughes Research Laboratories and The Aerospace Corporation. He has published over 160 scientific papers and 10 books. He has organized 12 international scientific meetings. He is currently with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Pasadena, where he studies the San Andreas Fault.

New Book:
As a reminder, we are anticipating Brian Matsumoto’s new book with the title of, An Introduction to Digital Photomicrography from Crowood Press.  The book is more comprehensive then the title indicates, I have put this on my must have list.  This book is scheduled for release sometime in April 2017.

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Weds May 17, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

The Pond Life program is undoubtedly one of our best attended and most exciting hands-on meetings! This is the event that you bring in your microscope (if you have one) and a samples of pond water obtained from your neighborhood: basically pond water, ditch water, puddles, fountain water or any other natural water samples. If you don’t have a pond source then just come and enjoy the collections brought in by others. We hope to have water samples from all over southern California. This is a fun, hands-on meeting, and one at which we'll hope to see new and exciting discoveries.

Suggested equipment list: water samples, microscopes, illuminators and pipettes and tools to play with the water samples. (Extra microscopes are always a good thing to bring for guests to use.)

If you have books or publications that identify Pond Life then do bring those along as well.

Check out the amoeba to the right, courtesy of www.micrographia.com.

Here's a video by Tom Jones showing pond water organisms filmed at the Microscopy Society of Southern California, May 2015, Pond Life Meeting in Santa Monica, CA. The specimen is lake water collected from Lake Gregory, in Crestline, CA., with a 20um pore size plankton net. Two different microscopes were used. The Rotifer is probably Synchaeta sp. and is shown in dark field using an Olympus BH-2, 1.67x projection eyepiece, DCD condenser, mag changer set at 2x, and a DPlan 20x objective. The second and third parts of the video show Stentor sp., also in dark field, using an Olympus SZH Research Stereo Microscope, DF Plan 1x objective, ILLD illuminator base set to dark field, SZH-PT phototube with a 1.67x projection eyepiece. Zoom magnification was set at 64x. A Tucsen TrueChrome II camera at 1080p was used for all parts of the video.

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Weds June 21, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

"This meeting will be an Antique Slide Making Workshop managed by MSSC member, Tom Jones.  Participants will learn to make antique slides and take home a wonderful collection of historic slide mounts."

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Weds July 19, 2017 - NO MEETING.

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Weds, August 16, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

Speaker: Erin C. Young, PhD.
Project Scientist, Solid State Lighting Program, Materials Department, University of California Santa Barbara

Abstract: X-ray diffraction and its association with various types of microscopy
This talk will give a brief history of the development of the X-ray diffraction technique and its role in determining the structures of many important types of both biological materials (i.e. DNA, drugs) as well as inorganic materials (i.e. metals, ceramics, semiconductors).  Sources of X-rays for this type of work can be small enough to fit on a lab benchtop, or as large as a 1 km diameter synchrotron light source. Dr. Young will give some examples of the ways that X-ray diffraction is used in his work at UCSB to design and understand semiconductor materials and devices such as light emitting diodes, and how X-ray analysis is complementary to other types of microscopy is used to characterize materials.

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Weds, September 20, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

This will be the annual Trade and Sales meeting. Bring microscope related equipment and supplies to sell or trade. Or just come and see if there is something on the tables that you have been looking for or something you just must have.  If you need a nice microscope for the grandkids, this is your chance to snag one for almost nothing.

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Weds October 18, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

Speaker: Laurent A. Bentolila, Ph.D.
Scientific Director, Advanced Light Microscopy/Spectroscopy Lab California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA

Super-Resolution Imaging and the Renaissance of the Optical Microscope

Abstract: Fluorescence microscopy is the most widely used imaging tool in biology. This stems from the non-invasive characteristics of optical microscopy which allow the probing of structures and functions of live cells in the 3D space at the submicron scale. Moreover, fluorescence microscopy provides high sensitivity down to the single-molecule level which permits the observation of molecules and organelle-specific signals. However, the resolution power of far-field light microscopy is constrained by the diffraction limit of light, as explained by Ernst Abbé more than a century ago: any object, no matter how small, will be imaged by a conventional optical system as a finite-sized spot, with a minimum dimension obtained for point-like objects (such as single molecules) approximately equal to half the wavelength of the incident light beam.

In recent years, several methods have been proposed to overcome the diffraction barrier of light using far-field optics. These novel “super-resolution“ techniques have increased the resolution of light microscopy by almost one order of magnitude. Some of these methods exploit non-linear processes to sharpen the PSF such as stimulated emission depletion microscopy (STED), reversible saturable optically linear fluorescence transitions (RESOLFT) and saturated structured illumination microscopy (SSIM). Other methods are based on the localization of individual molecules such as stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM), photo-activated localization microscopy (PALM), fluorescence photoactivation localization microscopy (FPALM), super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging (SOFI) and ground state depletion followed by individual molecule return (GSDIM).

In this talk, we will discuss the fundamental concepts behind some of these super-resolution microscopy techniques (aka nanoscopy) as well as some of the unprecedented new possibilities that these new approaches have created to investigate the structure and function of cells.

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Weds November 15, 2017 at 7:00pm, Wildwood School in West LA, 11811 Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles 90064 (map). Access is on Mississippi (one block north of Olympic) between Westgate and Grandville. Enter the alleyway between Westgate and Grandville on Mississippi and there is covered parking.

This is the annual Exhibition Meeting of the Society. This is one of the best events of the year and is a great deal of fun. Each member is encouraged to bring along an exhibit to share. Anything associated with microscopic subjects is welcome. Your exhibit could be simple, for example you could set up your microscope with your favorite slide. A projector will be provided for those bringing 35mm slides. Posters and display boards are also encouraged, along with the usual sales table. Please remember to bring a label or piece of paper with a brief description of your exhibit.

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No December meeting, instead the MSSC Holiday Banquet, Earth, Wind and Flour Restaurant, December 9, 2017, 5 - 9:30 pm

Come and celebrate the completion of another wonderful year with fellow MSSC members. Dinner cost $10-20, bring cash. All members and their guests welcome.

After dinner, we will present our annual report on the state of the Society, including plenty of highlights from 2017.  Our special Christmas program will be presented by our member in good standing, Carol Roullard, a superb Crystal Art Microscopist.  We will be overwhelmed by beautiful Christmas Crystal Images (more information to come).  As you will discover her work is nothing less than stunning! 

RSVPs to MSSC President required.

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