Here are two images of the same subject, taken with different lenses (microscope objectives). They have radically different character and quality.
Above: photo of a terminal bud from an apple tree, taken with a LOMO 10X objective in front of a ‘tube lens’ (a lens used with a different type of objective, more about that below in the technical section).
The strengths of this image are the emotional power (ugly, vicious-looking, very animalistic and a strong image overall) and the textures in it. The out of focus portions are interesting, too.
The weaknesses are technical: it’s not terribly sharp, there is a lot of haze in the detailed portions of the image, and only the middle is even somewhat sharp; the edges are both soft and warped.
The LOMO objective is a “finite conjugate” type, and would not normally be used with a tube lens. I just tried it to see; it was worse without the tube lens, so although it doesn’t need one, it behaves better with one. But it’s still a hot mess technically.
Above: photo of the same terminal bud, taken with a Nikon CFI Plan 10X objective, also in front of a tube lens. (This objective is designed specifically to work with a tube lens.)
The strength of this lens begin with its strong technical competence: most of the image is extremely sharp and clear; only the corners show some evidence of some softening. (Both of these lenses have some spherical aberration, but it is mostly tamed in the Nikon.) There is much less haze (because focus is better controlled).
But the Nikon image does have important weaknesses. The composition isn’t that great; the camera apparently slipped a tiny bit when I walked away to start the image sequence. The out of focus portions are not that interesting; they are just out of focus. (A quality lens is less like to create interesting shapes in out of focus areas.)
But the image with the Nikon objective does have some emotional character, if you can call a reaction to what looks like a bed of worms ‘character’. :)
What is amazing to me is that these are photos of a terminal bud, which to the naked eye looks quite plain and not very wormy. (It looks like it has a very slight fuzz to it.)
Non-technical note: The LOMO image looks to me like the monster from the movie “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Technical info: The LOMO is a “finite conjugate” lens, which means that it does something the average person would expect a lens to do: it comes to a focus. The Nikon objective is an “infinity conjugate” lens; it emits a parallel (collimated) beam that can travel an arbitrary distance. The tube lens collects that beam and projects it to the microscope’s eyepiece. As a practical matter, infinite-conjugate lenses are more flexible and are often used in high-end microscopes.
Both of these are focus stacks. The LOMO stack has fewer individual images because the step size was 15 microns, while the Nikon image has over 200 images and used a step size of 8 microns. The LOMO was true to its listed magnification, 10X; the Nikon was used in a “short configuration” where the tube lens was about 50mm closer to the objective than specified; rumors are that the Nikon yields a sharper image in this configuration (but I suspect this also causes some of the spherical issues in the corners, so it’s a trade-off).
This is what the terminal bud loos like to the eye, taken with iPhone: