Purple Passion

In early August of this year, a friend invited me to photodocument a mining operation near Wickenburg, Arizona. The mine was originally operated for lead, silver and a bit of gold, but the current owners are after something entirely different...what the early miners would have called waste rock. The Purple Passion mine, as it is now called, is the source for a rather unique assemblage of fluorescent minerals. Fluorescence, as mentioned in an earlier post, is named after the mineral fluorite. It is a type of luminescence emitted by a material that when subjected to ultraviolet (UV) radiation---electromagnetic radiation off the blue end of the visible light spectrum---seems to glow in the dark. The fluorescence of most fluorescent minerals needs to be observed in the dark.

In this image, I photographed one of the miners standing in front of a rock wall at night (not underground, but under the stars), shining a UV lamp onto the rock face. Part of the "speckly effect surrounding the man is actually digital noise as I shot this image at the equivalent of ISO 25000 (most point and shoot cameras operate in the 200-400 ISO range). I thought it looked kind of neat, not to mention ridiculously difficult for me at this stage to remove, so I left it in.

I had been fluorescent collecting once before---for little bluish-white specs of scheelite in eastern Washington---but this was something else all together. Everything around you just glowed a brilliant orange, blue-purple, white and green, and shades in between. I even found two fluorescent materials that skittered away as I rolled over the boulder they were under...scorpions glow bright grayish-green.