I was born in December 25 th, 1995 and I live in Bullay, a small town on the river Moselle near the towns of Trier and Koblenz. The Moselle valley and the surrounding vineyards are a lovely landscape, and so, when the weather is fine and I am not working with my microscopes, I like biking and mountain biking. I also like sports and nature in general so that gardening and tennis are also favourite hobbies.

Model making,  especially model railway and, in particular, model aircrafts are also favourite pastimes. Using a flycam, I enjoy taking aerial photographs and video clips from the region where I live. The following image gives an example of flycam photography; it shows the river Moselle in late winter, and a lot of ice floes just before melting.

Moreover I am also engaged in gereral photography, especially macro imaging and photography of animals and plants in their natural environment. The free-hand photographs presented below were taken with a “Magniflash” device, consisting of an achromatic ancillary lens and a ring flash.

When I was five and a half years old, I asked my father for a microscope as I was fascinated by the idea of seeing things invisible under normal circumstances. And so I got a Leitz “HM-Lux 3” as my first microscope. In addtition to the achromatic standard lenses this instrument is fitted with, higher corrected objectives for phase contrast examinations and several slides for darkfield and phase contrast were also purchased. Thus, I was soon fascinated by my trips into the microcosm, and observations of several specimens in differnet illumination modes (brightfeild, phase contrast and darkfield) were an exciting game for me.

I soon tried my frist steps in photomicrography, because I liked to take photomicrographs of my visual impressions. At the beginning, I took my first microphotographs with the HM-Lux microscope available. About 2 years later, when I was eight years old, I asked my father for a “bigger” instrument, fitted with a trinocular phototube, designed for Köhler Illumination and equipped with a flash necessary for high quality imaging of motile living specimens. Now, I have a Leitz “Dialux” microscope which could be used well for these tasks. In the following years, this microscope was extended step by step so that I could also work with polarized light, Heine phase contrast (in addtion to the Zernike method) and interference contrast.

In the winter of the year 2009, I tried “just for fun” to make preparations of snow flakes, and I was disappointed by the low visual information which could be obtained from the standard illumination techniques my microscope was designed for. And so, I tried to improve the three-dimensional appearance of these preparations; condenser-based variable bright-darkfield contrast (VBDC) resulted from these experiments. The surprising effects of this technical variant inspired me to think about further developments and ideas leading to improved microscope imagery. Thus, subsequently, I succeeded in developing variable phase-darkfield and phase-brightfield contrast (VPDC, VPBC) as further complementary techniques leading to improved results in imaging of several specimens.

For the future, I hope for some support from industrial partners so that some of my ideas which could not yet be realized in practice might lead to prototypes of special objectives (glass and mirror lenses) and special condensers according to my suggestions and discussions contributed.

At present, I go to school (class 11, Martin von Cochem Gymnasium, academic highschool, Cochem / Germany. homepage: http://www.mvcg.de). When I have finished school, I would like to study physics and/or mechanical engineering.



Last Update: August 10th, 2012
Copyright: Timm Piper, 2012