Thursday, January 26, 2012

Moar Mineral Mashing Madness: Muscovite

Here's a preview of a larger project that's in the works. I plan on bashing my way through Bowen's Reaction Series, but I thought I'd post one of the shots to get some feedback. Mainly, is the depth of field sufficient? I'm limited in how small I can make the camera's aperture and still get decent results, so I can't get more depth of field without buying more lights. And the pair of 500W tungsten lights I'm using right now are really, really hot. Like over 200°C near the bulb hot.

So, in what what will become a more "continuous" series (heh) of clips for the silicate minerals:


I'm not sure I like the hammer used in this shot - the 3lb sledge was too heavy to quickly pull away, so it kind of dominates the scene and covers up the mineral, so I adjusted the playback speed in a few places to minimize the time the hammer occupies the frame. The well-developed single plane cleavage of muscovite presented some additional challenges. In order to produce deformation (separation along that cleavage plane), I needed the direction of maximum stress (the hammer blow) to be perpendicular to the cleavage plane. I was worried that a smaller hammer would simply slip off or something and leave me without much visible deformation. But this kind of hammer wouldn't produce good results with smaller, more brittle samples.

No comments:

Post a Comment