April will soon be over and Bug Month will be upon us before you know it. But we still have one livestream to do, a competition to judge, and a couple of videos to unleash upon an unsuspecting world. And there is another thing I want to accomplish before we wave goodbye to the crystals for now - and that is a DIY project and the subject of this post. I want to show you how to make your very own full waveplate, which will include a DIY tip that you will want to know about! By the way, all the images in this post are my own home-grown and photographed crystals. And because they are mine, I can name them whatever I want - and that is precisely what I have done. By the way - all of these pictures were taken from the same slide - all are of vitamin C dissolved in methyl ethyl ketone, but plated differently to see how many different crystalline forms could be created using the exact same starting solution.

But let’s pause for moment to talk about waveplates. A waveplate is a pice of material, often quartz that has the unusual property of perturbing the orientation of some of the polarized light which happens to pass through it. I essentially takes polarized light of one orientation and turns the plane of oscillation through 90, 180 or 360 degrees (quarter, half, and full waveplates, respectively). We use them in the photography of crystals to modify the polarized light interacting with the crystal lattice of the target, and in so doing, cause a dramatic increase in the color output from weakly birefringent materials. I end up needing one about 10% of the time. So it is a useful tool to have access to, but there is a problem - these waveplates can be very expensive. The reason, or one of the reasons, is that the quartz has to be sliced or polished so thinly that it often needs to be supported by an additional layer of material before it can be safely used and that adds to the optical complexity of the device. Fortunately, we have an alternative. Because we don’t have to concerned with the accuracy of of plane rotation, we can simply use any relatively translucent birefringent material that will cause some of the polarized light to rotate. The jewel cases that used to hold CDs are made of one such material, but you don’t have to look far to find dozens of other suitable plastics. To see if the clear plastic you have found will work, just place it between two sheets of linear polarizer and look through the layers at your light source. If everything is suddenly brilliant and filled with color, then you are in luck. Now all you need to do is cut out a circle of the material and you have a waveplate ready to use.

I strongly urge you to make sure the cutter is perfectly balanced, the blades viscously sharp, the drill press running at it lowest speed, and you have eye and ear protection on place. This is what the process looks like…

When done with care, and plenty of WD40 you can expect results like this…

If you are in the market for a drill press, tis is a wonderful option at a very good price - it is a lot better than my Harbor Freight special, but for a lower price. (not that this is an Amazon Affiliate link - which means I may make a small fee from Amazon if you purchase anything using my link).

The cutter is a specialty item but not hard to find -

This is the single arm version of the cutter I use.

OK - with that done, let’s get back to the schedule- this week will kick off tomorrow with MacroTalk at 8PM where I will be talking about the vertical rig, and why I abandoned my most recent build to start over.

The link for this conversation is right here - https://youtube.com/live/vMbc3UGs2SI?feature=share

There will be plenty of other stuff to talk about and we need to get the decks cleared for Thursday and the official launch of Bug Month!

This will be the first Macro Talk Too of the month and the link is right here - https://youtube.com/live/oYoFzkzTDBk?feature=share

*** LATE ENTRY***

I just finished up the Macro Talk Too livestream and, if I say so myself, I was very happy with how it went. We talked mostly about getting butterfly wings ready to photograph and talked about composition and lighting fro these lovely but challenging subjects. I talked about several things you may want to see a link for, so I am including them here:

The two companies I sourced these wonderful butterfly wings from were Moss and Monarch who carry the selection of butterfly wing pairs, and the Little Caterpillar, who are currently having a sale, almost half price, of their day flying moths and other select butterflies. The ones I got from them were near perfect and very inexpensive. I recommend both companies and will definitely be using them again.

A few things that I would strongly recommend you get if yo are new to insect photography:

There is no Pzoom this weekend, but there will be a pair of videos coming out that should keep you entertained over the weekend! The first is the results video from the April competition and this one should be well worth watching as I have a couple of very special guest judges helping me this time around.

Back by popular demand are Lauren and Joseph Walls (yes - that Walls!). Lauren and Joseph helped judge one of our competitions last year and they did such an excellent job I told them we would be inviting them back again. This time I am going to get them both in front of the camera so you can see just how thorough and thoughtful they are when judging the entries. I am really looking forward to having them on, but they are both busy professionals and it may be a couple of days into May before we can get everything lined up for the recording. I do hoe to have the video out to you before the weekend. If you have not submitted a picture or two, you only have today and tomorrow to get it in to the Walls-app.com competition page!

Which leaves us with the featured event of the week. A summary of thousands of photographs taken over a ten week period using the new continuous lighting solution from Optolux and Novoflex - the review of the Optolux Solis.

I will say nothing further about this video release as the edit is not complete and I have not decided on the release date, but it will be sometime this week. This is a fascinating system and I hope it will be as interesting to watch as it was to make.