Clarke Art Institute Granite
I am embarking on a new project to create some shots based on granite that was used for additions at the Clark Art Institute. These are intended to be used by Bud Wobus, professor emeritus of geology at Williams College, during an upcoming talk at the institute.
I am still in the exploratory phase experimenting with lighting and getting to know the samples he was kind enough to lend to me. More to follow here.
I am still in the exploratory phase experimenting with lighting and getting to know the samples he was kind enough to lend to me. More to follow here.
Clark Art Institute Granite 2
I have been working on fine tuning the lighting to highlight the variety in these specimens. The super bright highlights have been difficult to deal with even in diffuse lighting. I am still in the exploratory stage working with very low magnifications but I think I have identified some areas to evaluate with higher power objectives. It is still all preliminary at this point.
Clark Art Institute Granite 3
I am staring to get the lighting worked out (I think) and have moved to 5 times higher magnification with a larger span. It is starting to get much more interesting at this point. Still digging in on refining things but It is getting closer. This is an intermediate grab of a shot that is about 70% finished with the primary image processing with about 16 hours left to go.
Clark Art Institute Granite 4
Although the slabs (monoliths) that Professor Wobus lent me for this work are not precisely 1x4x9, the closer I get in to these with higher magnification, the more I want to just say: "My God! It's full of stars!"
Clark Art Institute Granite 10
I am finally getting down to where I want to be for abstract work. This has been one of the more difficult subjects I have dealt with due to the difficulty of lighting - the slightest change in lighting changes the whole image, and the depth of the features within the not fully transparent quartz reduces the achievable contrast levels. But I am near where I want to be. Professor Wobus believes the features here are rutile. By my measurements/calculations, they are about 100-400 nanometers across which is about the scale of visible light wavelengths. Working at this quantum limit of light is tricky. The artifacts around the details are a result of the way light reflects off of things at this scale and this is basically what your eye would see if you were shrunk down to that scale. From the abstract art perspective I am getting more and more happy with the results at this scale. The entire width of this shot is 0.423mm.