The picture above, of a piece of whitish marble taken from Ben Baun, was taken by backlighting the translucent stone with a flash from behind. ‘Stains’ of other minerals cause the white light to look orange and red.
Invertebrate animals with calcereous shells first appeared in Earth’s oceans some 550 million years ago. It was 100 million years earlier that a new sea had opened, and what are now Connacht and Ulster lay along its margin. Thick deposits of sand became hardened into the quartzites raised up in the immense cliffs of Achill Island, or crowning peaks in Donegal and Connemara with a gleam of snow-white scree. Deposits of lime hardened into marble – in Connemara, a beautiful jade-green rock, now cut and polished into fireplaces and tourists’ ashtrays. – from Michael Viney’s “Ireland”.
People talk about the colour of spring but sometimes the eternal colours of nature are worth a second look. Even in the dull pall of cloud at the summit of the Twelve Bens or the Maumturks on a winter’s day, I never tire of admiring the vivid colours of the rock underfoot. And I usually put a particularly colourful pebble or two in my pocket as a souvenir.
The glitter of orange and red [Dalradian] quartzite is the result of ancient, soft sandstone pulverised into a hard unyielding rock, which is all that is left of a much bigger mountain range, long-worn by the effects of glaciers millenia ago.
All of the pictures were taken with a Canon 40D camera and a Sigma 180 mm macro lens, along with either 1 or 2 remotely triggered Canon 580II flashes. The stones were setup in a mini-studio that I bought in Maplins in Galway.
The studio setup is pictured above (it was taken with a G9 fitted with a Canon transmitter ST-E2). As you can see, the 2 stands for the flashes are actually wooden Midleton whiskey containers. As any dedicated photographer will tell you, having good whiskey within arms reach is an essential part of photography.
I love the whitish marble shot!