#rock collection
finally getting to use my rock tumbler :)
or should I call it a rock tumblr? ;)
Afternoon hike with Tofu and Boris!! I got a new Cintiq pro 24” this year which broke pretty quick BUT it just came back from the Cintiq repair department and it’s been working great since then! I really love how big the screen is and the remote it a helpful add on (however the touch screen is kinda bad unfortunately, if you’re looking at getting one definitely recommend saving your money on that feature)
I always envy those amazing glamor shots other folks can get of their rocks…. someone on another site asked for some high-quality images of the stilbite cluster and that made me sit down and figure out how to make my camera do the work.
Turns out it’s:
-Aperture priority, 1/13th - 1/8th shutter speed
-ISO 100
-Hi-def Image-stacking mode (my camera can stack three)
-A tripod
-A lamp and a cheap lightbox with a black craft foam backing
-Manual focus
-Kicking the cats out of the home office so they quit making things bump and shake
My fancy Sony Cybershoot (AKA a point-n-shoot with an option for manual focus, not a DSLR-etcetc) managed to get these last night. Took a few tries, as the camera shows things overexposed on the screen; if I correct exposure for what I’m seeing on the camera, it’s underexposed on the monitor.
Top to bottom, pink stilbite cluster, lemon calcite cubes, pink heulandite geode, quartz geode with calcite crystal, and my stilbite flower, which is still my favorite find! No post-processing, just as they came out of the camera, tiny jar lid for a shooting stand included :P
Post link
I really need to learn how to polish big flat rocks.
Finally getting warm enough to cut again! Most of these are from the claim.
Stilbites plus a really pretty pet wood!
Ethics in rockhounding is more than just picking up litter, not making rockstacks and filling in your holes. Petrified wood is free to collect from BLM land in my state, but cannot be collected for sale or trade and has a yearly limit of 250 lbs per person. Stilbite crystals like these are common, and are also free to collect, but cannot be sold without a claim. Both these things are marketable, worth money. I could profit off this.
I could sell them and no one would ever know I was, in essence, stealing rock from my state unless I told them. No one knows where I go, is watching over my shoulder, is mapping my routes behind me to make sure I’m being honest about what I find and where. Even the landowner I work for wouldn’t know what I found in their land unless I told them. And while material provenance is a really big deal, no one in lapidary hobby or crystal collecting asks to see proof of legality.
Ethics in rockhounding is also self-policing my own behavior with rock and crystal. It’s me returning profits from private-land material to the landowner, under our current arrangement, and is me spending several hundred dollars to set up a legal small mining claim with my county and state before I sell public-land material. I am not getting into anyone else’s business about where they get their rock and what they do with it, but I’m doing everything in my power to play by my state’s rules for my business, even when no one would ever know. Profiting off a public resource without the proper permitting and paying my dues would be theft, and a form of capitalism at its absolute worst.
I still haven’t decided if I’m going to claim the stilbite. I may or may not look into that for next year, depending on how much material is there and if I think I can break even! We’ll see.
Went crystal hunting for stilbite today! I found this place a few years ago but it is kinda a scramble to get up there so I really hadn’t been back until today. Worth the climb, I think.
Playing with rock over the weekend!
Products of yesterday’s cutting!
On the subject of 100% natural things that can absolutely harm you, this is Trent agate. It’s from one tiny deposit in eastern Oregon and is allegedly no longer able to be found and collected but still circulates in quantity in the lapidary hobby world. That stunning vibrant red firework pattern is likely Realgar, a very beautiful arsenic sulfide. It’ll decay with time to bright yellow Orpiment, a historical pigment whose toxicity is well-documented! While I’m not going to make myself sick cutting this one slab, my saw oil now has trace arsenic and orpiment in it and will transfer tiny amounts to everything else I cut. Opse. At tiny amounts on not-food-objects it’s a negligible concern but it’d absolutely harm my long term health to be repeatedly breathing in the dust and dust-laden oil off the saw. I’m going to let the oil settle, then pour it off and discard the sludge. Not worth scrubbing it off everything else I cut!
@ people when they ask why I’m cutting rock: why aren’t you?
Excuse me while I go discover tiny worlds inside the pebbles underfoot…
