Identified as Manganite on Calcite, Hotazel, S. Africa
Stacked at 6.75X
FOV 2.4mm (cropped)
Under normal lighting these crystal faces tend to be either brilliant mirrors, or dead black. Diffuse lighting allows a decent stack, but also fails to reproduce the mineral as usually perceived by the eye under a scope. Reflected images of adjacent crystals are a common issue (as seen in the upper right).
This is a good image, but I can well imagine the subject would not look like this in normal lighting.
Have you tried using illumination that is sort of "in between" normal and fully diffused?
What I'm thinking of is well diffused but small from the standpoint of the subject. For the subject "looking up", the lighting will be one or more bright disks in a dark sky.
By changing the size of the disk(s), or distance from the subject, you can tune the hardness of illumination. Facets will be bright only if they reflect one of disks. But because the disks are extended sources, they will still enable soft edges on the out-of-focus blurs, which should at least reduce the artifacts that impede stacking with point sources.
--Rik Edit: tweaked wording
Last edited by rjlittlefield on Sat May 18, 2019 3:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I know the difficulties of photographing minerals with very reflective facets (and which are the ones we like the most). I like the control of brightness that you have achieved, sometimes it is really impossible to achieve the appearance, brightness and transparency of some minerals.
