Hi,

100% laser for 1 ms OR 1% laser for 100ms?

This is a subject that has been bothering me and I have never got quite the 
answer for it.

After speaking to someone who uses 100% laser power (sorry I don’t know 
what the actual laser output is) I noted their goal was to expose for the least 
amount of time possible (which was only a few millesecs). This enticed me to 
check myself how my protein structures (podosomes) could handle 100% laser 
power as opposed to 30% which I usually use. As expected the exposure 
times went down significantly (from 320 ms to 30ms) and in fact I was able to 
still get decent information from 10ms exposures taken every sec for 3 mins. 
Surprisingly, I saw no detectable bleach and it did not seem any different to 
long exposure times with less laser power.

Im only new to microscopy and surely others must have experimented with: 
high laser+ low exp compared to low laser+high exp. 

I really want to know, which one should I do (high or low power)?

It seems that there could be mathematically and practically equivalents of 
high laser+low exp to low laser+high exp (ie as above 100ms 1% power pairs 
with 1ms 100% laser power). So, is there a relationship between power and 
exposure time exists that can sort of be mathematically related?

Cheers

Seb