Jez Graham blog – Inner Harbor, Baltimore 09/02/15
Having fun at the Biophysical Society meeting with Chris Baumann (89 North) and a few of the guys from Chroma. Sunday was quiet, but I had the opportunity to catch up with SciMeasure and IonOptix to discuss stupidly fast CMOS cameras and other possible future projects. Dinner was at a Forest Gump themed restaurant which served shrimp, shrimp and shrimp. Despite being tempted by the oxymoronic Jumbo Shrimp (thanks Chris) I ended up with something called Accidental Fish and Shrimp, which meant that a hapless mahimahi fish had got caught up in the shrimp basket and ended up on my plate; with some shrimps. Sharing dinner with the guys from Chroma meant that the conversation inevitably turned to filters.
Can’t say who’s fault it was, but a new Chroma / Cairn marketing opportunity was conceived for a bundled package of 6 Neutral Density filters to be promoted as “50 Shades of Grey” (actually 63 combined shades if my maths is right).
Today (Monday) was much busier. We were testing shiny new BV421 and BV480 dyes with corresponding new filter sets. On the Olympus BX53 frame with the LM75 lamp they seemed to nicely fill violet and cyan emission gaps not covered by the Alexa dyes and were very bright and photostable. Meanwhile on the other rig we had the Nikon Ti with TriLine, Crest X-Light, Photometrics Delta, TripleSplit, OptoSpin, and ASI MS 2000. Penny from MDS called by and got roped into helping us journal fast Z stacks in MetaMorph with the slide scanner module, which worked nicely. After a brief diversion with a soldering iron, borrowed from the obliging folk at ASI, we had a working MultiStream and were able to stream Spinning Disk Confocal three colour z stacks at camera-limited rates.
Thoroughout the two days Paul Millman has been recruiting for Chroma’s dinner at The Helmand; no prizes for guessing the nature of the cuisine. He was up to a cosy table for 55 by close of play yesterday, so we’re set for a fun evening………..
