River Rock

River rock is one of those terms used everywhere in the country that everyone knows what means and no one defines. Generally, it’s rock that has a relatively smooth surface. I say relatively, because its not as smooth as a polished tombstone, but it’s not jagged.

If you ask for something more specific, people take the adjective smooth and turn it into a verb. There the trouble begins, because they start to say things like “the erosive action of the moving water from a river smooths and shapes the stones. Other times, they say something slightly romantic like “smooth surfaces created by tumbling around in rivers for years.”

Maybe, elsewhere in the country. Here, even when the Rio Grande is running high, like it was in the above picture take last October under the Griego Bridge in Española, the water only creates rapids. You don’t see rocks being tossed about. More likely you see them laying outside the action where silt can filter through them.

Smoothing and polishing are not the same thing. The second is done by removing material, often by breaking large pieces into smaller ones. In a rock tumbler, the polishing is done by some kind of abrasive grit, something like silicon carbide, with water used as a facilitating lubricant, not as the active agent . The winds here move sand at high enough velocities to blast surfaces.

The above is a piece of granite I found in the area of the far arroyo this weekend. Part of it has striations that left a relatively smooth surface. The darker corner at the top in the picture below was untouched. There the smoothed section has a lighter color because the abrasion removed the tops of the softer, darker mica, but harder flecks of quarts remained.

The smoothing of river rocks is done by filling in rough surfaces with finer sand that drops when the river currents slow. It often is the same general material loosened by wind and deposited in the water. Eventually the sand becomes welded to the surface, like a rind.

I first noticed this with a bit of granite I picked up somewhere along route 554 north of Ojo Caliente last fall. You can see the brown outer skin is very different than the quartz and mica inner stone. If you look carefully, you can see the outer layer isn’t uniform in thickness, but penetrates in low edges to fill the rough places. That’s what creates the coarse textured, smooth feeling exterior surface.

If the river rocks were polished by removal, they’d look more like tombstones or the stone above. Instead, they look like amorphous potatoes. Round, formless, grey lumps.

Someone broke the above rock outside a near neighbor’s drive. Since he works for Cook’s Transit Mix, I assume the rock came from somewhere just north of Española. You can just see the lighter colored outer layer that built up around the granite, especially on the lower curve in the upper left had corner.

Last weekend my immediate neighbor had loads of sand brought into our shared drive by a friend of his who said it came from his yard in Velarde. A broken piece of granite filled with quartz and mica landed near my gate.

Again, you can see the boundary between pock marked grey shell and the uneven texture of the broken face. It may looked like it’s been smoothed by removal, but if you look closely you can see the uneven fill that protects the bright interior with a dull overcoat. In places it has even started to colonize the surface.

Quartz

My bookshelf is beginning to resemble something hidden in the backroom of a museum. Sedimentary rocks kept from crumbling on my floor lie in baggies. None are particularly attractive. They simply will be informative if I ever put them side by side to learn the differences in the different sediments in this area.

My camera doesn’t like any of them. I fantasize about the silicon chip rebelling at such ugly dates and give it nicer silicon oxide to look at.

White colored quartz is common in the arroyos, usually as pebbles, but sometimes in larger hunks. But more aesthetically pleasing are the small, broken ones with exposed facets that capture light.

A Green Rock

The trouble with rocks is they have a tendency to follow you home. If you’re not careful, your living room becomes encrusted with quartz, the kitchen counter lined with granite. I keep telling myself, look but don’t touch.

Of course I don't listen to myself.

Yesterday I found a handsome green rock in the bottom of the near arroyo. I suppose it’s some form of granite, with red iron splotches.

I don’t know what the white streak is.

I probably won’t ask at that rock store. The last time I went, the young salesperson looked down at my rock from Dixon, and declared that’s just a rock. Now a mineral, he wanted me to understand, has specific characteristics.

Characteristics I repeated to myself, not character.

At least, before he dematerialized, he did deign to tell me the rock from the Dixon area wasn’t shale. Maybe granite. He couldn’t say. But definitely not shale. Just a rock.

Rocks are impervious to the wisdom of the young.

Light

My greatest photography problem seems to be light - too much outdoors, not enough inside. With my digital cameras, when the light’s wrong, the focus doesn’t always work correctly.

My travel camera allows you to alter the light exposure, so the problem of too much light can be mitigated. Of course, you have to get the settings right. As my pictures taken on my trip west of Albuquerque show, a certain amount of experience is required to develop an instinct for those settings.

However, experience is one of those things one can get. It just requires patience and time.

The problem with not enough light requires non-human resources, especially since my close-up camera has no light control. As I looked at my failed pictures of sample rocks taken in the house, I recalled those images of fashion photographers at work with banks of lights in a room and what look like umbrellas in front of the lights to diffuse their effects.

I decided my problem with photographing rocks is that I lacked enough diffused light at table level. I went to the hardware store with some vague idea of a 25-watt lightbulb on a cord somehow set on a low stand, maybe one of those clips they sell for mounting work lights.

As I walking though the lighting department I noticed those gooseneck lamps magazines are always marketing to people of a certain age whose eyes now tire. They claim their array of low-wattage lamps produce something like daylight and imply a panacea for aging.

The store happened to have a desk top model with a light that sits about 11" above the surface. For $15, it was worth a test.

It’s not quite voila yet, but the problem has been changed from helplessness in the face of changing conditions, to learning how to use a tool. Depending on the rock, I have to move it nearer or father from the light. Sometimes, I’ve tried draping a white plastic bag over the top to adjust it a little.

To illustrate my problem I took a stone I picked up in a neighbor’s yard that was the right size to throw at a threatening dog. I quickly realized it was a keeper.

I first got a decent picture of it with my travel camera (picture 3). I then turned off the lamp, but left the altered light settings (picture 2). I next let the settings revert to the default problem (picture 1).

I then took out the indoor closeup camera. The lamp was too bright to show the detail of the rock, and so I used different sheets of colored typing paper as shields (pictures 4 and 5). As you can see, the biggest problem after focus is color reproduction. This is a grey and clear rock, with only a hint of a golden hue to the naked eye.

How Hard Can It Be

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 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?