I finally made myself do some more work on the collection of lava bits from the 2018 eruption of Kilauea volcano, choosing different pieces and playing with the lighting.

I used my folding lightbox again, with its ring of overhead LEDs, plus an old desk lamp (also LED but with a nice glass lens to focus it down some) with a gooseneck to position it. Most of these are stacks of 4 to 8 frames, combined in Focus Stacker on my Mac.

First one is just a few of my 'models', mostly the one on the lower left. About an inch long (I forgot to include a scale, sorry).


The bubbly structure can be seen better in this one


And you can really see the 3-D lacework here. I also like the way the bokeh rendered out on the sparkly bits in the background (that's why I didn't crop that part out )


Lovely colors on this corner




Enough for this post. More of Madam Pele's beautiful creations coming soon to a thread near you!!

[MikeMcE]

Any clue what it’s composition is ?


Hang up and DRIVE!

[RoxnDox]

Any clue what it’s composition is ?


Hang up and DRIVE!

It’s a basaltic lava, about half silica and the rest a mix of aluminum, iron, magnesium, calcium, and a smattering of other stuff. The glass texture is due to very rapid cooling. The melt solidified before the atoms had time to aggregate into mineral crystals (pretty much the definition of a glass).

A good lay reference - See Hawai'i Volcanoes and Haleakala National Parks (Volcanoes of the National Parks of Hawaii)

[Photogoof]

That's some fascinating detail.

[Liney]

Great colours and textures, well done. I love it when macro opens up views you would never normally see

[q_crack]

It is the first time for me when I am seeing up-close photos of cooled down lava and I am very impressed! The bubbly glass structure makes it look like something from another planet, a totally different world!
Technically well executed photos, thank you for sharing!

[Bertrand3000]

I especially like the third picture. I had no idea it could look that.. sticky! Thanks for sharing!

[JensE]

I really like the changes in lighting compared to the first set. The 3rd picture is also my favorite - I'd however crop it even tighter, so that the gray background is gone, together with what looks like sensor or rear element specks.

[RoxnDox]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone! It has been fascinating to me as well, to see what the tiny structures look like when magnified.

I really like the changes in lighting compared to the first set. The 3rd picture is also my favorite - I'd however crop it even tighter, so that the gray background is gone, together with what looks like sensor or rear element specks.

I like that idea... I had kept the wider crop in order to keep the sparkly shiny bits of bokeh down in the corner, but I will see what it looks like your way. The grey is a sheet of paper for a neutral backdrop, and the specks are actually tiny bits crumbled off the main fragment that I neglected to move out of view. Oops!

[MikeMcE]

It’s a basaltic lava, about half silica and the rest a mix of aluminum, iron, magnesium, calcium, and a smattering of other stuff. The glass texture is due to very rapid cooling. The melt solidified before the atoms had time to aggregate into mineral crystals (pretty much the definition of a glass).

A good lay reference - See Hawai'i Volcanoes and Haleakala National Parks (Volcanoes of the National Parks of Hawaii)

Excellent!! The more I see, the more we learn!


Hang up and DRIVE!

[RoxnDox]

Here are a couple of different crops of #3. First one keeps as much of the sparkly background as I could, the second is a much tighter crop to just get the in-focus areas...

[RoxnDox]

A couple more images from today. I added a 1.4 TC to my rig and got a little more magnification to see into the lava bits... Field of View is about 5mm in the complete shot, 3mm in the shot with the whacked corners. I think I overloaded the focus stacker s/w on that.

[Liney]

The latest ones look like soap bubbles, really great images

[RoxnDox]

They really do, yeah. Only it was molten rock supercooled into glass to make those films instead of soapy water. Mother Nature and Madam Pele working to create some very artistic pretties!

[BigDave]

One of my favorite aspects of macro photography, allowing the viewer to experience something in a way they could not do with normal human vision.