Propping up a dodgy memory

My slab of Charoite (also known as Charolite) is from Siberia, and I have a funny feeling it didn't come to me quite by entirely legal means. I bought it from a well-established dealer in the US, but I read somewhere that it wasn't permitted to export raw slabs from Siberia, only tumbled stones. I tell myself that I couldn't have read such a thing, so perhaps it's just that it's only quite tricky to get an export permit.

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The problem with a large and fabulous piece of rock such as my East Java plume agate, is that you end up with an awful lot of shots straight out of the gate. Rather than wait until I've weeded and processed them all, I've made up a contact sheet to give you an idea of what's in the pipeline.

ED: Now with contact sheet of modded images to show what I do to them.

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I have an odd relationship with lapis lazuli. It's frustrated me no end in the past. It looks beautiful, but I've never been able to photograph it in a way that really captures the deepest blues and the glitter of gold. I can't say for sure I've done it yet, but with the microscope those tiny flecks of gold are at least visible as tiny nuggets. It must be said that I've helped the colours along with brightness and contrast corrections, but the saturation is all the same.

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I'm not entirely sure where Sheep Creek is, but it's almost certainly somewhere in the USA. Wherever it is it has some interesting geology. Plume agate is one of the types I particularly like to collect and photograph because of its dreamy shapes suspended in milky depths.

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I had a lot of fun with my slab of rhyolite when I first got my microscope, and even the macro shots with the camera came up nicely. The original post with just the normal camera is here, and a comparison between camera and microscope here. I thought I'd done a post with just microscope shots but it looks like I just put the pictures on Facebook without doing an LJ post. (That link is to the whole album). From memory that was during one of the LJ DDoS attacks which made posting text near impossible, and uploading images to Scrapbook *absolutely* impossible. My new Flickr account says hello.

I've included one of the original microscope images here for contrast because in this second batch the colours really come out. I'm hoping a couple of these will scrub up well enough for print.

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One of my unpolished slabs of moss agate is from Bloody Basin and co-incidentally features some quite gory colouring. The first batch of microscope shots revealed all sorts of interesting shapes and patterns, but were sadly washed out by the default camera settings (original post with many images here). I came back for a second go and include one of the original images here for a then-and-now comparison. It was tricky to locate the same tiny patch of real estate!

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If the horse was a flat slab of interesting rock, or a digital microscope, one could say I was somewhat back on it. Pretty rock pictures may soon be making a reappearance, and here's a couple to go on with.

(This post is also notable because it's the first time I've uploaded new images to flickr to point to, rather than using the rather horrible lj Scrapbook function. An important step in freeing myself from this place.)

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Today's pretty rock is a rough slab of marcasite in agate from Nipomo California, USA. ( Read more... )

Again just some quick microscope images of my new and fabulous slab of Pietersite. I'm really looking forward to some concentrated photography sessions with this great specimen.

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Haven't really felt up to playing with either rocks or rock pictures, but I wanted to have a try at merging two shots with different depth of focus to create a single image with the maximum amount possible in focus. i.e. overcome the greatest weakness of both my camera and microscope shots, which is very shallow depth of focus.

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