How Hard Can It Be?

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]

How hard can it be to photograph a rock?

It’s not a child or an animal, it doesn’t move.

It’s not a plant, it doesn’t defensively reflect light?

How hard can it be?

The answer turns out to be, how hard can it be to photograph something no engineer cared about?

I picked up a piece of that gray fallen rock on the road to Picuris to take to the Rock Queen to see if she knows if it’s shale or not. It is sedimentary, contains some quartz and mica, and crumbles a bit.

My old trusty camera took reasonable pictures, but not with any great detail. The quartz, or what I assume is quartz, appears as white blurs.
 

My first attempts with the new camera used default settings which let in too much light. I hadn’t washed the rock, and it picked up the browns. It looks more like sandstone than anything.

After I tried again, the color was better but much too dark. In some cases it was possible to get some sense of surface detail, but not much. It looks more like an old piece of wood than a rock.

I tried the other camera someone had told me would be good for closeups including rocks. I hadn’t noticed the dead leaf until the camera caught it. Unfortunately, lighting was still a problem with the reflective quartz which washed out the surrounding color.

I’m serious, how hard can it be to take a picture of a rock?

I guess at my age the question is no longer does the challenge make sense, but can I meet it.

How long will it take me to turn a mute piece of digital equipment into something useful?