A Tiny World of Lichens

Lichens and bryophytes grow on practically every tree, but you've probably never seen them like this! Up close they look like a beautiful alien landscape. This video shows several lichen species and some surprisingly colorful tiny moss that I found growing together on the bark of a maple tree that fell in my backyard.
An Alien Egg?
At one point you'll see what looks like a round black alien egg with tentacles coming out of it. What the heck is that??? If you have any idea, leave me a comment.
Photobombed by a Mite!
See if you can spot the little mite that crawls into the field of view near the end. Orbatid mites are common, harmless residents of environments like this, and this one was about 0.3 mm long.
Technical Details
I recorded this video with a Panasonic GH6 camera using an Olympus 60mm macro lens and Mitutoyo 5X, 10X and 20X microscope objectives. The field of view ranges from about 12mm down to 1mm wide, and the illumination was ordinary white light showing the subjects' natural colors. My focus-stacking software combines hundreds of images for each video frame in order to achieve a large depth of focus at high magnification, and this video was generated from about two million individual images taken from 32 terabytes of raw footage.
Music: A Short Tale by Roger Stark, licensed through audiio.com.
Check my channel ‪@BrainRight‬ for more of my microscopic videos, and also the CNC motion-controlled microvideography system that I built in order to create videos like this.

[@chrisleech1565]

We need to get more eyes on this content @BrainRight !!! Cheers, Chris

[@tomashernandez828]

Impressive shots!

[@BrainRight]

Thanks, it was a fun project and I'd never looked at lichens this way before.

[@JustinAlexanderBell]

Beautiful footage

[@BrainRight]

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.

[@chrisleech1565]

Just what the doctor ordered. With all this crazy nonsense going on, you bring us a peaceful grounding video. You could do a series on lichen so please don't stop there. Remember the flowering stage and fruiting stages are quite pleasing to observe. They are just wonderful subjects for your motion control device. I wonder how long it would last in an insulated package. You could get the audience to send samples of their local flora

[@JayLizMcClellan]

Thanks Chris, glad you enjoyed it. I'll probably revisit lichens in the future because they're so fascinating, but I want to keep branching out to different kinds of subjects. I'm always open to suggestions for subject matter, though I've tried some things that seemed like they should work well but just didn't work out technically or didn't look as fascinating as I expected.

[@medovoe-pomeste]

Hello. Is it taken as a photo and then animated into a video? Or was this originally filmed as a video?

[@BrainRight]

This was recorded as video, but at high magnification the depth of focus is very small so I used an image stacking technique to achieve a large depth of focus. Each frame of the finished video is a combination of hundreds of images taken at different focus positions. I developed my own software to process the many terabytes of raw video and combine the in-focus parts of each frame.

[@medovoe-pomeste]

@@BrainRight Thank you! Analyzing the video, I came to almost the same conclusion that photo sessions were taken, each of which consisted of several hundred frames, and then a video was stitched together from them.

[@medovoe-pomeste]

@@BrainRight What is the magnification in this video?

[@BrainRight]

@@medovoe-pomeste The optical magnification onto the camera's sensor ranges from about 1X up to 16X. With some slight cropping that gives a field of view that's about 16mm down to 1mm wide.