Our Pics

About our Pictures

Fluorescent display cabinet We’ve had a lot of comments about the quality of our pictures and questions regarding how we take them....

Perhaps the most important item when viewing our images is to make sure you are utilizing the maximum color resolution of your display monitor.

We do not retouch the colors of any specimen at any time. We may occasionally edit a photo to remove “noise” from the background (noise = dust, lint, excess lighting - etc).
We crop all of our photos to fit a standard image size. The image quality is also reduced to allow for (relatively) quick downloads but still retain the true image of the piece.
Lighting is supplied by flash. Camera is a 3.3 mp Kodak DC4800 (or lately a Minolta Dimage A2), computer controlled.
Fluorescent pictures are taken under very controlled conditions:

Black box eliminating all ambient light.
Typically 1 to 12 second time exposure - depending on the brightness of the piece (Note: this is the area where the picture may not be the best representation of the specimen - due to the wide intensities found in FL specimens it is very difficult to capture an image which displays all the colors with equal intensities). Where we feel that the image is not an exact representation of the piece we will add a note.
UV filter to eliminate blue haze (possibly along with a Wratten 1E filter if haze is excessive due to exposure time - and colors permit the use of a “blue-blocking” filter).
Three different sources of high intensity UV illumination for SW, LW, and MW.
Natural light images of FL specimens are affected by the size of the black-box and our ability to illuminate them sufficiently.

Size - one of the hardest pieces of information to present is the “size” of a specimen. Where possible, we include a thumbnail of each specimen with a US dollar bill, a pencil (or equivalent) to provide a relative perspective of the size of that piece.
Macro lens, F5.6 or F8 depending on size

For a more in-depth discussion of what the camera sees versus your eyes, visit the “colors” page....

Monitor Display Colors
Every computer will display colors differently and affect how the colors of our minerals are perceived. The colors depend on the type of monitor (display) you are using, the graphics card which drives the display, and the settings of this card. Colors of FL minerals are best represented on a display set for its maximum color resolution (and often highest maximum pixel resolution). The images below will help you determine the quality settings of your monitor:

	This image is made from 256 shades between pure red and pure yellow. If you see vertical bands of color your monitor is displaying in “low-color” resolution. If you see a smooth transition from red to yellow your monitor is set to “high-color” resolution (16 million colors).

	This image starts out just like the one above, but uses a 216 color “browser safe” range of colors. You should see 6 distinct bands of colors. If this looks the same as the one above, you are only seeing 256 different colors. The larger the difference, the more colors your monitor is displaying.
For a more in-depth overview of colors and your display settings visit http://www.easyrgb.com/display.html Additionally, your monitor should be able to draw straight lines: All the lines in the above box are parallel. (They really are - check it out with a ruler!)