I had to haul today’s subject out of the woods using my own two hands. Had Karen been wearing a backpack, I would have slipped it inside without her being the wiser.
Anyway, I found this lovely chunk of quartz just off to the side of a popular hiking trail in the White Mountains. It was in an area known for quartz outcroppings of staggering size—some are the size of small cars. (Note: I am not talking about quartz crystals, but just outcroppings in and around the western Maine schist bedrock.) Someone had obviously busted this piece off, and then decided it was too big to carry down. I hate when people do this; do you have to deface everything? Next time I go up that particular trail, I plan to bring this back with me and find a natural-looking place to leave it up near where I found it.
This was also, oddly, hard to shoot. I tried three completely different lighting setups, before finally settling on one that lets the simple elegance of the stone shine through. It’s about 10 inches tall and probably weighs three pounds.
Here’s the big Flickr version.
Meta: Pentax K-3, Sigma 18–35mm f/1.8 Art lens at f/8, ISO 100, 1/160th of a second, key light and reflector, 8-image focus stack
