Focus Stacking with a Raspberry Pi – Mould Macro Photography Project

In the search for interesting things to photograph on a macro scale using my focus stacker, it was suggested to me by Sara that mould might be worth looking at – well, it is!
I started off with a 10mm sliver of beetroot less than a week ago and it is already producing lots of mould growth. I placed the piece of beetroot on a small polystyrene foam-board tray in a sealed plastic container and put that in a cupboard where it would be in the dark and stay warm. Within three days I had a few circles of white mould with one starting a grey centre.
Three days later the surface was covered in interlocking circles of mould – all grey except one which is very yellow. The white/grey mould is like little flowers and the yellow mould is like small pom-poms. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
I have reproduced some of the images from my focus stacker here. I have some other food items in my test lab waiting to see what will happen to them.
The image above was taken at a magnification of approximately 0.5 and cropped to show a 10mm sample width – taken with a Tamron 90mm SP lens without extension. Low magnification images were taken with a Nikkor 50mm enlarger lens at f 5.6 reversed onto 135mm Minolta MD lens at f 3.5 giving a magnification of 2.7 – focus increment of 100microns – varying numbers of images. Higher Magnification images were taken with a Componon 28mm enlarger lens at f4.8 reversed onto a 200mm Minolta MC lens at f8 giving a magnification of 7.1 – focus increment of 20 microns – varying numbers of images. Images were all stacked in Zerene Stacker.
Click on any image for a slide show of the hidden world of mould (I never thought I would be typing that!)







