The theme for 52Frames this week was “Experimental Photography“. I have a fondness for pretty rocks/minerals, and I was thinking these days they’d be a nice photography subject (that doesn’t move too much). So last week I pushed the door of a mineralogy shop, and I got out with a few specimens to start experimenting.

This one is a chalcopyrite, and it comes from Wallis, Switzerland. Taking the picture was a matter of taking a lot of them and stack them using Zerene – which I had used successfully a few months ago for the Macro theme. I’m however super unhappy with this picture for a number of reasons:

• I hadn’t fixed my white balance and ISO, which meant my pictures were not as consistent as they should have been.
• The light was crap, and the shadow below/left is not pretty.
• I have an ugly purple fringe on the left that’s ugly, and I’m not sure if it’s a matter of light, of lens, or both.
• I used my lens at its longer focal (300) – by mistake, but I didn’t double-check what I was doing – and I think it’s not as sharp there as it would be at 200.
• My white paper background is getting very dusty and I should change it.

So, all in all – many mistakes were made… but that also means that many lessons were learnt, and that next one will be better!