Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Egret


We visited the Wild Animal Park near Escondido yesterday. There are quite a number of native critters that call the park home and this egret was standing quite sentinel like near the radio-controlled-boat pond. What is a bit disconcerting in the image is that this is actually the bird's reflection in the water. The ripples visible to the left of the egret have taken on an abstract nature and as such don't help.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Spheres



These shots were taken for fun to show the amusing sort of things one can do with ultra-transparent (inclusion free) crystal balls.
It concludes this week's installment of images and, unless there is a barrage of requests pleading more, sphere photography.
The designs seen through the crystal are scrims (screens for cutting/diffusing light). One has a square weave and the other a hexagonal weave. The magnification is strong enough that these resemble the interference figures seen in petrography. A glass rod with a ball on the end is used as an analyzer in conjunction with a polariscope to test gemstones...same sort of thing.
At any rate, this is end of spheres...

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Inclusions


Five days of spheres is too much...for me anyway. I had intended to talk about inclusions in the next post and decided (with the hint of a friend) to indeed show an inclusion, but of a different type than originally contemplated.
This is a picture of the interior of an amber nodule from the Baltic Sea coast---and life sometime between 23 and 33.9 million years ago, maybe older. One day, back then, an ant was trapped in the fresh tree resin and along came an opportunistic arachnid, surmised an easy supper, and became mired beside it. Maybe the spider did not conceive that it would get stuck since its own web material does not effect any adhesion on its legs whereas other hapless critters generally become hopelessly entangled. At least it had a last meal, which is more than the ant could have said.

Looking carefully at the area near the spider's feet, one can observe disturbances on the amber; rings that evidence the spider's struggle to free itself.

Especially after "Jurassic Park"---book and movie---amber with insect or other inclusions has become a rather popular collectable. While there are plenty of examples on the market, it is still incredibly rare stuff to see "action" frozen in time. First, most tree resin isn't even preserved. It rots away on the forest floor unless ideal conditions come along to preserve it. Second, the ratio of nondescript "junk" trapped in the amber to well preserved, identifiable objects is rather high. Third, taken from there, the percentage of identifiable victims caught in the act of doing something other than having collided with, stepped on, or otherwise managed to get themselves glued to the nice, fresh resin, has to be minuscule. At least in my experience.

Tree resin: easy to find. Fossilized tree resin: cool. Hapless individual(s) caught doing something embarrassing and recorded for millions of years and all to see: priceless.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Perfect Crystals


In Monday's post I used the adjective "nearly" when discussing the idea of a flawless quartz sphere because any gemologist will tell you that very, very few gems are indeed "flawless". At some magnification, some inclusion will betray its origins, especially in a stone as large as this sphere. That said, an entire industry was built around the search and discovery of crystals large and perfect enough for precision lenses and other optical equipment. Then again, this material is quite rare in nature and demand for it birthed---or at least greatly support the establishment of---yet another industry: synthetic crystal growth.
"Eye clean" quartz spheres are rare enough that one generally wants to check its authenticity. Fairly easily done with two crossed sheets of polarized film (such as those found in some 3D movie goggles) and a light source. "How" is a longer story that I don't want to get into at the moment, but I would be entirely overjoyed to expound on the process to any interested parties...it involves a bit of rotation and if you get a wink from the stone, Robert's your father's brother and the stone gets a nod.
Heritage Auctions' natural history consultants and I also scrutinized the sphere with an intense scrute and a strong light and discovered very, very tiny fibrous inclusions that in the gem trade would be called silk. Holding such a sphere up to a strong point source of light can produce what is called asterism...the optical property that gives us star sapphires, rubies and, albeit very faint in this case, star quartz.
This is the first shot I made of the specimen. Definitely shows the sphericity and clarity, but all messed up with reflections: the diffuser is apparent three times, the table, yada yada... Interestingly, none of the surface nor internal reflections are observable in the reflection of the sphere on the table.
Nonetheless, it was back to the drawing board.

The Other Side...


I just spent the last 8 days shooting gems and minerals for Heritage Auctions and their upcoming Natural History auction in January.
One of the items I had to shoot was a nearly flawless quartz sphere.
What do you see when you peer into this crystal ball? Well, the other side---or, at least, what is on the other side. Only backwards and upside down.
One of the aspects I was assigned to show was the fact that this sphere is completely transparent---as much as quartz can be. Some of the images I took do not really present that clarity in an obvious way (some of the shots we just had fun with---"we" because I was assisted by Craig Smith with this one). This was one (again for fun; not a serious contender for the catalog). However, someone familiar with optics would say otherwise. Unless the photographer went to great lengths to arrange reflections on the front of the sphere to be tonally opposite yet symmetrical to that of the image's background, the sphere's clarity is made evident by the fact that the light and dark tones are exactly reversed on the front of the sphere from those behind it.

Neat stuff. Anyway, saving more for later as I intend to use a different image of this sphere for each day this week.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Burg Strechau



Quick one today...such as "today" is. I left work at 01:00, technically Saturday.

After photographing the interior of Burg Strechau, I drove through the small village of Strechau below the castle to try and get a decent image of the whole complex. After being overcast most of the day, the sky opened up just as I was leaving and allowed me this wonderful light and celestial backdrop.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Afternoon Sun in Beijing...Expectations



I saw a picture of a large white stupa in a pond at a presentation in Phoenix on Buddhist art. The view in the image was from a moderate angle above the object, much resembling the snapshot of a child in which the photographer has not knelt to be eye-to-eye with the subject. The image was projected and not really that clear so I assumed the greenery surrounding the stupa were grasses, reeds and garden plants.

When I visited Beijing I felt I had to visit this important monument---it is home to the guardian of Beijing---and set out to look for it. People kept pointing out the direction to me and I kept peering down nooks and crannies to find my destination. Perhaps it was my experience at finding "Manneken Pis" in Brussels...I was expecting something bigger and in a more prominent location considering its national significance to Belgium. Not disappointed...delighted actually and, in fact, somewhat amused by my expectations.

When I finally arrived at the correct park, before me stretched out a lake of some square kilometres and good sized island with an impressive 100 metre or more high edifice.

I had no idea the photo that we were shown at the presentation was taken from a good distance away, and undoubtedly from an aircraft.

At any rate, it was early afternoon as I walked across the bridge to ascend the hill to the stupa, and stopped to record the willows hanging over the water at the island's edge. Yes, that is the sun. The upside of stinging eyes.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Leila


I don't have nearly as many portraits of this person as I would like. This is Leila, my beloved wife, and today is her birthday.

Happy Birthday, Love!

:-) Mark

Red Green Show



Interesting how just one branch of this tree produced these red and orange colors while the rest is still vibrant green. I don't remember what kind of tree it was; perhaps a kind of maple. It certainly stands out though.

Which leads to some thoughts I have had about individuality. We often see in people the desire to stand out from the crowd as an expression of one's own identity. As one of the first two punk rockers in the small village where I grew up, the concept is close to home. It begs the question though: "In a room full of punk rockers, which one is the real individual?" Many years later, I was talking to a geologist friend, who knew about my past fashion sense, about the dress code for the company Christmas dinner coming up at the time. When I mentioned that I had planned to wear my tuxedo, my friend exclaimed that I was bowing to the establishment...betraying my 'rebel' self...and that she was attending in her jeans and field shirt.

"You think so? Hmmm. I would imagine that geologists being geologists, most would be doing the same; or maybe throw on a sport jacket or something."

"Right. We don't do the business uniform."

"Ahh, and in this way all these geologists would be bucking the trend."

"Right."

"And one tuxedo standing in this crowd would be...?"

Well, that wasn't so much driven by the desire to express my individuality as it was to shake things up a little...that can be fun sometimes. I had learned much before that exchange that the battle toward the declaration of individuality was not one necessarily successfully fought on the outside, but very much on the inside. A strong sense of identity can wear any clothes. Thomas Jefferson is credited with saying,""In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." The crux of growing up is figuring out what kind of rock one is.

I'm thinking metamorphic...I like change...and gneiss things.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Pink at the Purple Passion




Not much to say today.

A cactus flower I photographed this past summer while doing the shoot at the Purple Passion mine.

A good day today, but a long one. Longer one tomorrow so it is off to get some sleep.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Portraits


Most of my photography has dealt with rather inanimate objects: landscapes, flora and of course minerals. People, and portraits in particular, I find fascinating but I have not really begun to try to photograph them in any serious way. This is largely because many of the people I know are relatively camera shy...and so am I, only from behind the camera. I have not completely gotten over the feeling that I am somehow being invasive with my camera.

I had the opportunity, a week ago, to meet a person on the U-Bahn in Munich on my way back from my first day at the Münchner Mineralientage, Europe's largest trade show for minerals, gems and fossils...and more. After a chat and being people of some spontaneity, we arranged to meet for brunch the next day. It turned out that my new friend was quite photogenic, quite happy to ham in front of a camera and, given the day off (she was working for one of the dealers), quite willing to model at the show from some images I need for an article I am writing.

However, not far from the restaurant where we met was a bridge over the Isar that made for an impromptu studio. I won't get into the details of why we needed to get to the grassy spot next to a playground at the end of the bridge---just think "pets"---but seeing the colorful trees, including the greenish bark and the subtle background of children playing made me suggest trying some "hide-and-seek" sort of photos. Trying to make a posed picture seem like it isn't is not that easy. At first, one doesn't necessarily appreciate the nuances involved in getting a portrait to say what one wants it to say until one is attempting to produce an image as imagined.

I am, of course talking about deliberate portrait photography rather than the more "capturing the moment" type, in which one, either by anticipation and good timing, or by sheer dumb luck, manages to depress the shutter release at the very moment someone, unaware of the camera pointing in their direction, does something that when frozen in time, expresses a particular emotion well.

At any rate, I was still surprised at how many times Margee had to sneak, jump, or whirl around that trunk to get the three or four shots I thought were good enough to keep.

Full Moon in Freiberg


Low clouds had moved in---not quite or much fog, or the building would have been more obscured---by the time we crossed the Obermarktplatz last night in search of a restaurant that friends recommended for our visit to the city of Freiberg in Saxony. With the full moon penetrating the gauze like vapor and the building lit by an orange-yellow street light, this clock tower had a strange feel about it. Not visible in the picture are the near freezing wind and the wisps of fog swirling around the tower, though the latter are somewhat evident from the softening of parts of the image, especially the light glare of the lamp. Late by a day, but very Halloween.