Dalhousie exposed

As a PhD student, Oliver Braubach spends hours with his eye to the microscope, trying to get the perfect photomicrograph of the zebrafish brain.

“You really have to know what you’re doing,” says Mr. Braubach, 26. “But you can get some very beautiful pictures of brain cells.”

From the tiny mountainous country of Liechtenstein, Mr. Braubach first arrived in Nova Scotia almost a decade ago as an exchange student. Instead of returning to Europe to finish high school, he applied to Dalhousie University and graduated with his BSc (Honours) in 2003. He’s now working toward his PhD in physiology and neuroscience, focusing on the zebrafish as a model for studying learning and memory.

A note about technique: “In a nutshell. I have been taking multiple exposures (three to six) of each subject at varying shutter speeds, AV values, etc. I then overlaid these images digitally and for the final photograph used only the properly exposed areas from each snapshot. This allows you to see almost everything in underexposed, shadowy parts of the photograph, while also seeing everything in an overexposed, sunny part of the photograph. Add to that a little desaturation and filtering (during the picture taking) and you come up with some pretty strange looking images.”

“We can see how the brain is wired together and how it eventually crumbles with age and disease,” he says. “What makes the zebrafish so appealing is that it is transparent. You can almost see a single neuron in a living animal – something you can’t do with mice. They’re too furry.”

SEE DALHOUSIE EXPOSED: A photo essay.  

Even when he’s not in the lab, he’s still taking pictures – photography has been a passion since his grandfather handed down his 35-mm point-and-shoot camera. He loves the openness of Nova Scotia and enjoys acting as tour guide for family members visiting from Europe.

“Living in the Alps, you can’t see past the mountains,” says Mr. Braubach. Landlocked Liechtenstein has a population of 35,000 and is just 160 square kilometers in size (or about three per cent of the size of Halifax Regional Municipality). “Here, I can go to the beach and see the horizon. I really appreciate that.”