I was recently asked by Markus Salamander, a nature documentary enthusiast, to visit his YouTube channel to talk about rocks and minerals and their identification. Our session boiled down to an almost one and a half hours chat on geology, rocks, and their formation processes. Check the video out below (unfortunately only in Finnish) or on Markus's channel.
Showing posts with label minerals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label minerals. Show all posts
Friday, December 27, 2019
Thursday, December 12, 2019
#geologisetmateriaalit mineral poster
All the mineral pictures from this autumn's Geological materials (#geologisetmateriaalit) course with mineral names and chemical formulas are now compiled into a neat poster licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0.
A2-size PDF is available upon request from aku.heinonen@helsinki.fi.
Most
of the samples come from the University of Helsinki Department of
Geosciences and Geography teaching collections curated by the Finnish Museum of Natural History (LUOMUS).
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Stepping up the macro game
Since I started my daily geological materials posts on social media a couple of weeks ago, I’ve constantly been thinking and researching ways to improve the quality of my mineral macro shots. I have a decent basic Canon full frame set-up of 6D (v.1) with a 100 mm 2.8/L macro lens and have been using external LED elements for main lighting but many of the objects I want to take pictures of still do not yield to the physical restrictions of optical realities.
Main issue in macro photography is the focal depth that very much starts to become an issue in the cm-scales of mineral samples. For focal depth you need more light but long exposures make magnified shots prone to shaking and other external problems. The basic set-up just hasn’t been enough to achieve all the things I’ve wanted to image and I’ve constantly been looking at some alternatives to improve the situation.
In mid-September, we took the first year students to the traditional “freshman” field trip in Southeastern Finland. One of the stops on the trip is a gem-quality topaz quarry around the town of Kotka, which has been quarried by several mineral clubs on and off for the past decades. I remember going there with my tutors when I started my studies as well.
The quarry is located in the Kymi topaz granite stock, which is associated with the ca. 1.64 Ga Wiborg area rapakivi magmatism (you can read more about rapakivi granites for example here), and it is possible to find nice amazonite, fluorite, dendritic biotite, and even beryl samples there. The main attraction, however, is the slightly bluish and, at its best, transparent gem-quality topaz. For many years, the yield of the annual trip has not been very good as most of the good samples have already been hounded from the surface and no one has been doing any recent blasting at the site. This year turned out to be a bit different…
Three of the students were able to find some very nice, rather clear and euhedral topaz crystals. The largest one was a 1,4 cm long stubby crystal, with at least five prisms {110}, {120}, {110}, {210}, and {011}, 2 or 3 bipyramides {111}, {221}, and possibly {112}, and a terminating pinacoid {001}.
I was allowed to loan the crystal to take some shots but was again not happy with the way the first round of images turned out so I was finally motivated to invest a bit to get the shot I wanted. I ended up ordering a ring flash, extension tube set, and an adjustable macro rail in order to fine-tune the focal depth for focus stacking. Below you can see some results. There is always room for improvement especially in the far end of the focus range, but with this, I already start to be quite satisfied…
Main issue in macro photography is the focal depth that very much starts to become an issue in the cm-scales of mineral samples. For focal depth you need more light but long exposures make magnified shots prone to shaking and other external problems. The basic set-up just hasn’t been enough to achieve all the things I’ve wanted to image and I’ve constantly been looking at some alternatives to improve the situation.
In mid-September, we took the first year students to the traditional “freshman” field trip in Southeastern Finland. One of the stops on the trip is a gem-quality topaz quarry around the town of Kotka, which has been quarried by several mineral clubs on and off for the past decades. I remember going there with my tutors when I started my studies as well.
The quarry is located in the Kymi topaz granite stock, which is associated with the ca. 1.64 Ga Wiborg area rapakivi magmatism (you can read more about rapakivi granites for example here), and it is possible to find nice amazonite, fluorite, dendritic biotite, and even beryl samples there. The main attraction, however, is the slightly bluish and, at its best, transparent gem-quality topaz. For many years, the yield of the annual trip has not been very good as most of the good samples have already been hounded from the surface and no one has been doing any recent blasting at the site. This year turned out to be a bit different…
Three of the students were able to find some very nice, rather clear and euhedral topaz crystals. The largest one was a 1,4 cm long stubby crystal, with at least five prisms {110}, {120}, {110}, {210}, and {011}, 2 or 3 bipyramides {111}, {221}, and possibly {112}, and a terminating pinacoid {001}.
I was allowed to loan the crystal to take some shots but was again not happy with the way the first round of images turned out so I was finally motivated to invest a bit to get the shot I wanted. I ended up ordering a ring flash, extension tube set, and an adjustable macro rail in order to fine-tune the focal depth for focus stacking. Below you can see some results. There is always room for improvement especially in the far end of the focus range, but with this, I already start to be quite satisfied…
 |
Canon 6D;
100 mm 2.8/L macro; GENESIS GMR-150 macro rail; Viltrox extension tubes:
12+20+36 mm; Meike FC110 ring flash (LED-mode); ISO160, F/6.3, 1/30; focus
stack of seven images (Adobe PS edits). Length of crystal: 1.4 cm.
|
Thursday, September 19, 2019
On Dark Crystals…
A recent Guardian long read piece on “Dark Crystals” has popped up on my feed several times in the past couple of days and it sparked some immediate but maybe not too coherent responses in my head. Regardless of coherence, here are some thoughts:
Basically the piece is reporting that:
1) The demand for crystals (sensu lato) has been on the increase due to their alleged health effects.
2) Crystals are mined in hazardous conditions by people who don’t benefit (enough) of their perilous efforts.
The article then proceeds to describe several first hand accounts on these conditions and the people who have to deal with them. Alongside of not really defining what crystals in this context are, what is almost completely left out of the report is the “alleged” part in the health effect claims.
Lets be clear; there are none!
If a health effect is claimed it needs to be verified. In order for something to be verified, it needs to be observed. No observations of said health effects have been made. Full stop, period. To claim something else is unethical, at the least.
Where do the urge and need to come up with some bogus magical properties of natural objects then stem from? Crystalline structures with their many unbelievable and aesthetically astounding (and 100% scientifically proven) properties are already in themselves natural wonders and nothing short of an actual real life miracle! Where lies the need to invent something more? There is still so much we don’t understand about the true and really exciting phenomena in the crystalline world.
I can think of two reasons:
First is the primal need for people to come up with supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. This is further amplified by the inherent complexity and mathematical characteristics of nature (and especially crystalline matter). It's more difficult to understand things in order to explain them but very easy to come up with stories, analogues, and anecdotes, which follow some made up internal logic.
Secondly, and more importantly, there is financial benefit from feeding these said beliefs. This is the worse of the two and also the major machinery behind the problems described in the Guardian piece.
However, observations about problems in tracing supply chains made in the article are true for almost all modern commodities. I am not sure why the situation with crystals or minerals would be somehow special. Without belittling the troubles of people featured in the article, the framework descriptions of small-scale crystal mining could basically be replaced with a description of an Asian t-shirt factory. The problems are the same: lousy pay for strenuous and risky work, mostly executed by under-aged children.
I guess mining has an eerie aura to it nowadays and these kinds of stories somehow fit the prejudices of the tarnished industry image better than other products used in everyday life.
The reason why this topic resonates with me is that I feel rather passionately about the intricacies of crystalline structure and its actual scientific study. I also use the aesthetics of natural symmetry displayed by natural minerals to teach mineralogy and crystallography. The awe arisen by euhedral natural crystals is proven to be an intuitive and effective motivator to find out more about the inner workings of the natural world. There is, however, nothing supernatural about them, only pure and beautiful natural symmetry.
Maybe the line between bogus health claims and acknowledging the reality of the crystal realm is thinner than I have previously thought…
To underline, the long read logic is correct and I 100% agree that the business they describe is flawed on many levels.
Basically the piece is reporting that:
1) The demand for crystals (sensu lato) has been on the increase due to their alleged health effects.
2) Crystals are mined in hazardous conditions by people who don’t benefit (enough) of their perilous efforts.
The article then proceeds to describe several first hand accounts on these conditions and the people who have to deal with them. Alongside of not really defining what crystals in this context are, what is almost completely left out of the report is the “alleged” part in the health effect claims.
Lets be clear; there are none!
If a health effect is claimed it needs to be verified. In order for something to be verified, it needs to be observed. No observations of said health effects have been made. Full stop, period. To claim something else is unethical, at the least.
Where do the urge and need to come up with some bogus magical properties of natural objects then stem from? Crystalline structures with their many unbelievable and aesthetically astounding (and 100% scientifically proven) properties are already in themselves natural wonders and nothing short of an actual real life miracle! Where lies the need to invent something more? There is still so much we don’t understand about the true and really exciting phenomena in the crystalline world.
I can think of two reasons:
First is the primal need for people to come up with supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. This is further amplified by the inherent complexity and mathematical characteristics of nature (and especially crystalline matter). It's more difficult to understand things in order to explain them but very easy to come up with stories, analogues, and anecdotes, which follow some made up internal logic.
Secondly, and more importantly, there is financial benefit from feeding these said beliefs. This is the worse of the two and also the major machinery behind the problems described in the Guardian piece.
However, observations about problems in tracing supply chains made in the article are true for almost all modern commodities. I am not sure why the situation with crystals or minerals would be somehow special. Without belittling the troubles of people featured in the article, the framework descriptions of small-scale crystal mining could basically be replaced with a description of an Asian t-shirt factory. The problems are the same: lousy pay for strenuous and risky work, mostly executed by under-aged children.
I guess mining has an eerie aura to it nowadays and these kinds of stories somehow fit the prejudices of the tarnished industry image better than other products used in everyday life.
The reason why this topic resonates with me is that I feel rather passionately about the intricacies of crystalline structure and its actual scientific study. I also use the aesthetics of natural symmetry displayed by natural minerals to teach mineralogy and crystallography. The awe arisen by euhedral natural crystals is proven to be an intuitive and effective motivator to find out more about the inner workings of the natural world. There is, however, nothing supernatural about them, only pure and beautiful natural symmetry.
Maybe the line between bogus health claims and acknowledging the reality of the crystal realm is thinner than I have previously thought…
To underline, the long read logic is correct and I 100% agree that the business they describe is flawed on many levels.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)