Thanks for that
@MinnBobber. The image appears to be broken but the link below for the Photo Credit works. It's nice to have a visual reference. I was wondering if a black light would work to detect it, that's good to know it does.
Most of the cannabis I get is lab tested for mold, pesticides, and other contaminants as well as for potency. I still don't always trust it, especially when I get really frosty bud like that Bubba Kush I posted a few days ago. That looked so strange with the pattern of the trichomes forming white lines across the buds. It looked even weirder in person than it did in the photograph.
I have a 30x scope that I use to check for mold and have yet to find any. I should probably get one with more zoom, 30x is barely acceptable to be honest. I understand how many times in pictures it does look like the buds are moldy. I think a big part of that is lighting and focus. Especially with phone cameras it's hard to get a really good picture of small detailed objects. Phone cameras generally have bad macro performance, issues with lighting and color balance, depth of field, you name it.
Unfortunately that Bubba Kush is gone, but I have another strain that I'll use to try to illustrate this phenomenon. Unfortunately I only have a phone camera myself, and using it with the scope is not as detailed as directly looking through the scope with your eye.
The most questionable area is at the tip of the bud, I deliberately made it out of focus and changed the color balance:
This picture the focus and lighting are better, but it still looks somewhat questionable:
Zoom in with the scope and it's just a forest of trichomes:
This view is much more zoomed in and detailed when looking through the scope with your eye and not a cell phone camera with limited macro ability.
Even parts of this picture look problematic but in real life you can zoom in there and see layer after layer of trichs, no mold. The scope light is overexposed in the above picture which can also create the moldy look. Unfortunately that's about as high quality as I can get with my macro photography at the moment.