Polished stones are very difficult to photograph well and accurately. Reflections are a real problem, as is the three dimensional character of the stones when they are photographed up close. Furthermore, a polished stone actually looks differently when viewed by eye in or out of sunlight. The sun brings out depth and colour. What kind of photograph might represent the true characteristics of a stone?
My small digital camera is a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX500 with a 30x optical zoom lens. I always use the camera on an automatic setting for focus and exposure as I find this produces very good results. It is quite good at shooting in low light conditions but struggles at times in bright sunlight. I am able to take reasonable close-up shots with it – it has an automatic macro-setting that is said to be best at 5 cms distance.
For managing and editing photos, I use Picasa, an image organizer and image viewer for digital photos. Google offered Picasa as freeware between 2004 and 2016, but then discontinued it (replacing it with Google Photos). I am able to use Picasa still, but Google no longer offers support for it. Picasa allows me to do some standard things like rotating and cropping images, and adding text to photos. Cropping has produced the “up close” and detailed images of the Stones of the Day. Picasa also provides me with the means to intensify the colour (using a “saturation” feature) and well as brighten an image. I use the Paint app to resize photos (for posting on this blog or on Facebook etc.).
I have used these functions to produce the often stunning photos of the Stones of the Day. Below are examples of the original photos and the images I produced from them using Picasa.
First, Stone Twenty, a yellow quartzite from Birdlings Flat, is a good example of how “saturation” was used to inrensify colour. Here is an original photo and the photo as used in the Blog Post for Stone Twenty:
In the two sets below, the original photos were cropped before a little “saturation” was used to bring out the yellow:
The “close-ups” were constructed by using “cropping” to focus on only part of the stone, the basis being the “saturated” images to the right of the two sets above.
Stone Twenty-Two, a hydrogrossular garnet, was one of the few stones whose original photos needed little “enhancing” apart from cropping:
The “close-ups” were produced by further cropping of the cropped photos:
For this Stone, I also used “saturation” to intensify the colour of one of the “close-ups”:
Stone Twenty-Seven has very complex patterns within it, that are able to be brought out by cropping and a little saturation:
Sometimes a little more “saturation” and/or “brightness” was used in a “close-up”:
The last Post in this Series is The Thirty-Three Stones of Stay-at-Home. The first Post is Stay-at-Home Day One, Thursday 26 March 2020: Stone One.
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