I think of this macro (micro?) photograph as a wonderful failure. It went wrong in really beautiful and interesting ways.
This is another image made with multiple images using Focus Stacking. I took 118 separate photos, and combined them into a stack. Individual photos had only a small portion of the scene in focus, but the clever Helicon software (mostly) pulled out the focused bits for the final image.
The fuzzy white stuff is due to the “mostly” there. This had a LOT of out of focus stuff in each image, and although the software removed about 99% of it, the thin cloud that remains, while not real, has a certain charm.
I left the dark vignette around the outside because I found that charming, too. That is simply a limitation of the aperture size of the microscope objective, a rather fancy (but really beat up and hard-used) Mitutoyo M Plan 5x. That is one of the Cadillacs of microscopy, although my copy was “cheap” because it was clearly used in some industrial situation. (Judging from the pits, scratches, and scars, maybe something like photographing magma as it erupted…)
The parts that are sharp are wonderfully sharp, a feature of the Mitutoyo objectives.
Ingloriously shot on a slab of plywood with a small work light, not in the wild. The slightest bit of wind would have ruined the shot. I was worried the vibrations from the furnace might have hurt it, but it looks fine with respect to focus and sharpness. So: flawed, but beautiful is my judgment, I hope you enjoy it. A combination of nature and some technical magic.