bmah's Crystal Photography

Re: bmah's Crystal Photography

This rocks! (I'm sorry)

Cool to see a thread with your works. I've been following from dA since you mentioned back then.

Re: bmah's Crystal Photography

this thread rocks

i like your photo comments, especially on stacking because i didn't even know that was a thing you could do

edit DAMMIT

Re: bmah's Crystal Photography

This is amazing! I Used to collect minerals and crystals, and such years and years ago! I Also love the quality of the images. Brings me back

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What focus rail do you use? Just curious.

Awesome pictures man

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That's awesome bmah!

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I know next to nothing about rocks and minerals but they've always fascinated me. Very impressive set of crystals you got here imo

My favourite has got to be the Erythrite. Although it seems a touch out of focus with the closer crystals (you did mention that you were focusing on the bigger crystals), it's still a very nice pic

The Veszelyite is probably the sexiest though.

Re: bmah's Crystal Photography

I'm a fan, keep it up

Re: bmah's Crystal Photography

Pretty cool man. The thing that sucks about UV light is the colour burn on the blue end but pretty nice results nonetheless.

You do have this on a tripod ye? You should attempt to do light painting with these if lighting is consistently an issue, with a darker environment and longer exposure, it can turn out quite well.

All your stuff is rendered very nicely and I could see em in some sort of catalogue about them avec the details. Macro photography is sweet so nice taste

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this is the coolest thing i've seen on this site in years

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please never let this thread die

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Oh wow the Azurite you have are really cool!

Re: bmah's Crystal Photography

Thanks! Everyone seems to have the urge to make the usual puns associated with the field, so I'm used to it. Also, didn't know you were watching me on dA - thanks! I don't often pay a whole lot of attention on followers though.

I don't use a focus rail. If I had a non-SLR/DSLR camera, then I would definitely invest in one however. My older pictures (not shown here) were taken with a regular handheld digital camera, and a focus rail would've come in handy back then.

The way I take these pictures is to move the lens ring to essentially change the zoom levels. Each time I zoom in, I take a shot. Then incrementally I zoom in a little more and take another shot. Rinse and repeat however many times until I get full "coverage" (or the coverage I want) of the image in crisp detail. All of this is done with the DSLR camera on a tripod.

With my older digital camera, focus stacking would not be possible unless I had a focus rail. So my older pictures were rather blurry.

This pic would be an example of me being probably a little lazy and not taking as many pictures as needed to get full coverage of the image in terms of depth of field (see my description above). I only cared about that main crystal and didn't care to capture the surrounding context. Also, with the picture's field of view being probably only 1 cm or so, the magnification makes the output really susceptible to digital noise as well.

Thanks!

The issue with the UV light actually has to do with the light itself. High-quality UV lights do not emit a residual blue light, but those cost hundreds of dollars ($400-800) and I'm not ready to invest in one of those yet. I probably will look into getting a short wave UV light first, as many minerals only fluoresce under those shorter wavelengths. Right now, all I have is a long wave UV flashlight and a long wave UV bar light (that I bought from one of those birthday party stores).

Yup, everything's on a tripod. I'm lucky that I'm not in a high-traffic area, or else vibrations from outdoor vehicles would make focus stacking a real hassle.
Can you explain what light painting is? I'm not quite sure what you mean. Would the fact that I'm merging multiple images via focus stacking create an issue for light painting? None of these photos are taken from a single shot.

If I update with the same regularly that I do with Instagram, then this thread should last a fair while!

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I'll be continuing to update with loads of pictures until I catch up to my latest image. Then I'll probably update with individual pics from that point on.

Re: bmah's Crystal Photography

Since you are focus stacking then indeed light painting will be a problem. However, the fact that you can cleanly shoot at f/16 or even more permits you to have a way around that. What I mean by light painting is literally dancing a light around a high f-stop, low ISO exposure, highlighting whatever facets you are wanting to showcase, while in a dark environment. And then it'll pick up whatever the light has licked, so you can make it appear as though you have a much more elaborate light source (even using a flashlight or something can work as long as it's a pretty white LED).

It's only viable if you a have a solid rig but it appears you do :P anyhow just an idea if you feel restricted, but you are having solid results with what you're doing.