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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.