Dioptase on Calcite

Geopressure · Post by **Geopressure** » Fri Apr 05, 2019 12:42 pm

Thought I'd post this stack..shot with a T7i camera w LED lighting using a 10X Mitutoyo objective on 200mm Nikon tube lens. The green Dioptase crystals produced strong halos and shadows so I suppressed some of them by de-saturating the Cyan in those areas. A form of cheating I suppose? Comments welcome...

JW · Post by JW » Fri Apr 05, 2019 2:36 pm

Getting good color-balanced images of dioptase is one of the "holy-grail" challenges in mineral photography. Your image looks very good, even with the residual halos. I usually desaturate both cyan and magenta (I look for problems by oversaturating them first, in PS, to see if the cyan and magenta are present only as halos, or are intrinsic to the subject). Where is the rock from and what are the crystal sizes?

Geopressure · Post by **Geopressure** » Fri Apr 05, 2019 3:27 pm

The sample is from Arizona, not sure which mine. Beautiful material. Field of view is about 2.2mm wide. The original image looks slightly sharper before down-sizing for the post. Thanks for the comments.

grgh · Post by **grgh** » Fri Apr 05, 2019 3:43 pm

Beautiful shot

I am in envy and would love to own a sample such as this.

Geopressure · Post by **Geopressure** » Fri Apr 05, 2019 4:15 pm

Thanks..I had to borrow it from a friend!

BugEZ · Post by **BugEZ** » Sat Apr 06, 2019 4:06 am

Grgh

50 years ago, in my youth I lived in a small mining town in Arizona. My dad was a mining engineer. Occasionally he would take rock collecting visitors from back east to the leach pond vicinity where experiments (dissolving coper mineral from rock with acid) had been conducted on various minerals. Small pencil eraser sized rocks covered with tiny dioptase cristals were easy pickings. My dad carried a hand loup in his pocket to admire such things.

Keith

Geopressure · Post by **Geopressure** » Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:30 am

Those were the days for collecting. Not many easy pickings left anymore.

jojm · Post by **jojm** » Mon Apr 08, 2019 1:41 pm

During last years, numbers of good micro samples came from Christmas mine in Gila Co.
https://www.mindat.org/gallery.php?loc=3326&min=1295

Very nice photo!

Geopressure · Post by **Geopressure** » Mon Apr 08, 2019 4:36 pm

Thanks..Christmas Mine looks like a good possibility.

JW · Post by JW » Wed Apr 10, 2019 3:19 pm

Christmas Mine is likely, but so is Mammoth (Tiger). Arizona is packed with dioptase localities, however.