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 cares about?
I had 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 with different light settings, 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 bark than a rock.
I tried another camera someone had advertised as good for closeups including rocks. I hadn’t noticed the dead leaf until the camera caught it. Unfortunately, lighting is still a problem. The reflective quartz washes out the surrounding color.
I’m serious. How hard can it be to take a picture of a rock?
You get to an age when it no longer matters if a challenge makes sense, so long as you can meet it.
So, how long will it take me to turn a mute, mutant, mutinous piece of digital equipment into something useful?
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