Slit manufacture

Hi there folks,

Firstly thanks to all those who mailed me a new year card and apologies for
not yet sending mine out. I decided to get some 'proper' postcards printed
back at the beginning of January I had some difficulty finding a reasonable
printer but now I have found one and I should be sending the cards out next
week. I've enjoyed all your photos immensely.

I am writing to see how people make the slits in their slit cameras. It is
quite a long story and I'll be as concise as possible.

Apart from being a pinhole photographer in my spare time I am a
developmental biologist working on brain development in the zebrafish
(Brachydanio rerio). We use an interesting protein called kaede which is
derived from a stony coral that we have been using for our studies (see
http://tinyurl.com/673qb for details). This is useful because it will
fluoresce green normally but when excited with UV light between 350-400nm it
changes to red.

What has this got to do with pinholes and slits? Well, two (three?) pinhole
days ago I took a colleague and her bloke out to take their first pinhole
photographs (Philippa Bayley and David Rossi: look them up if you like).
She ended up working with kaede and was trying to figure out a way of
restricting the UV conversion of the protein from green to red. Of course,
after our day out she thought of the pinholes I make for my cameras. So she
got me to make her some pinholes out of brass shim. She used these in her
microscopes to convert kaede in only a few cells and it was all very nice
for her thesis.

Now she has gone off to Oregon to work and has got talking to folks along
the way and I've had several requests for pinholes from the folks she has
talked to. Despite my attempts to refer these folks to commercially
available laser drilled holes they seem to prefer my homespun version (the
zebrafish community is a bit like this). Now I've got a request from Chuck
Kimmel in Oregon who is asking about small slots or slits to convert kaede
in multiple cells in a line.

So I want to know if there is a good method to make nice small slits in shim
stock. I've seen plenty of fine slit photographs so there must be many
folks on the list who can make them. I tried a quick search of the archive
and the web but didn't find anything would be most grateful if anybody has a
good method to let me know. Should I use a scalpel or something?

For the record I usually use the needle poking method not the tiny drill bit
method to make holes in my brass.

Many thanks for your time and sorry for the long post.

Best

Tom
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Received on Thu Feb 3 08:13:44 2005