Axinite
Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau
Thanks. I did intentionally leave the BG "off black" as I've been trying to avoid totally dark backgrounds of late. But you may well be right - darker might be better.mjkzz wrote:Nice image! I always wanted to tinker with minerals, but they are so expensive.
Maybe a "blacker" bg? It looks like the lens is picking up a lot of ambient light. But then again, I am talking to a lighting master, so this could be intended effect.
Since you're into extreme macro, a good trick is to go to a mineral store and ask them for some of the sand and grit from the bottoms of their various boxes of minerals. Probably pays to buy a small specimen or two first though. You can get loads of very photogenic fragments that way - usually free.
Micromounts and thumbnails generally are not very expensive unless the species is rare, and nice ones can be had for less than a filter ring adapter. Besides, the point is to take photos of tiny things, so a mineral or crystal that is larger than a few millimeters, I find, doesn't have as much appeal or fascination when I photograph it. My preference is to collect these because they don't take up a lot of space, and they tend to exhibit cleaner crystal growth under magnification.
Beatsy is right--even some of the debris from specimens has something interesting to see in them, although I think it's easier to pose and arrange something that's larger than a grain of sand.
At 10x, I started to see things I never noticed before in specimens I'd acquired years ago. It takes a lot of patience and care to search, because minerals are not like living organisms, which have identifiable anatomical structures. I can search and search for hours and still miss something, or fail to get just the right vantage point, and that just makes me want to try harder. The whole experience is enormously addictive.
Some species that are fairly common but I think have a lot of visual appeal include:
malachite
calcite
chalcopyrite
hemimorphite
gypsum (var. selenite)
fluorite
wulfenite
pyromorphite
And within these, there are some specimens from certain localities that are more highly prized (and thus more expensive), so shop around.
Beatsy is right--even some of the debris from specimens has something interesting to see in them, although I think it's easier to pose and arrange something that's larger than a grain of sand.
At 10x, I started to see things I never noticed before in specimens I'd acquired years ago. It takes a lot of patience and care to search, because minerals are not like living organisms, which have identifiable anatomical structures. I can search and search for hours and still miss something, or fail to get just the right vantage point, and that just makes me want to try harder. The whole experience is enormously addictive.
Some species that are fairly common but I think have a lot of visual appeal include:
malachite
calcite
chalcopyrite
hemimorphite
gypsum (var. selenite)
fluorite
wulfenite
pyromorphite
And within these, there are some specimens from certain localities that are more highly prized (and thus more expensive), so shop around.
I will try to get some "freebies" at mineral shops.Beatsy wrote:Thanks. I did intentionally leave the BG "off black" as I've been trying to avoid totally dark backgrounds of late. But you may well be right - darker might be better.mjkzz wrote:Nice image! I always wanted to tinker with minerals, but they are so expensive.
Maybe a "blacker" bg? It looks like the lens is picking up a lot of ambient light. But then again, I am talking to a lighting master, so this could be intended effect.
Since you're into extreme macro, a good trick is to go to a mineral store and ask them for some of the sand and grit from the bottoms of their various boxes of minerals. Probably pays to buy a small specimen or two first though. You can get loads of very photogenic fragments that way - usually free.
yeah, definitely, at 10x, things look different . . . you sound a lot like my friend who did offered me some 2-4mm "sample", it is just that it is so hard to receive stuff from outside China. Anyways, thanks for all the info, now I am so tempted.hero wrote: At 10x, I started to see things I never noticed before in specimens I'd acquired years ago.
About 70mm. You can go as low as 0.7x, but the corners start to mush up a bit on FF. Having said that, it's no problem with deep stacks as you have to crop a fair bit off the edges to get rid of the streakies (due to the short FL of ~35mm).mawyatt wrote:...How close to the sensor is the back of the DI5400 to get 0.9X?