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Garnets weathering out of a boulder of gneiss (Tolland County, CT).
Tried to get nice morning light on the vein containing the reddish garnets - was hard with the trees, though... the leaves were almost as bad as the clouds! |
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The cliff face consists of granitic gneisses cut by basaltic dikes. It is elevated above the surrounding area by a fault near the edge of the Adirondack Mountains. |
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From close below the Tetons, this panorama offers a detailed look at the geology of the range front. The Teton Glacier is best seen from this angle and there are a couple of mafic dikes that cut the Archean igneous and metamorphic rocks that make up the bulk of the Teton Range. Oh yeah, a few tourists and cyclists in there, too. |
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I had originally hoped to get into the Barton Garnet Mine to shoot a macroGigaPan of the famous Gore Mountain garnets, but unfortunately I was a little too early in the season. The garnets at the locality featured here are from a now-abandoned garnet mine in the area that is currently located on state lands. The garnets here aren't as huge as at Gore Mountain, but they're nothing to scoff at. I shot this GigaPan with autofocus on. I was going to take this into Photoshop to clean up the out-of-focus areas at the margin between the outcrop and the distant trees, but I in the end I decided it just wasn't worth the effort at this time, because that's really not the most interesting part of the image, anyhow. The unusual arc of the stitched image is likely the result of inaccurate leveling of the Epic100 robot. That's due to the fact that I had to take the robot off the tripod and place in on a rough rock surface and hold it in place by hand in order to get the correct angle perpendicular to the face of this outcrop. |
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This macroGigaPan was shot in the field at the very accessible roadcut of Hague Gneiss seen in this wider view: Geologically this is a textbook example of a kinzigite - a type of metasedimentary gneiss rich in biotite and garnet. There are also some very large augen cored by feldspar near the lower right portion of the GigaPan that have asymmetric tails which indicate the sense of shear during the ductile deformation of this outcrop. Form a photography standpoint, what's a little bit unique about this macroGigaPan is that I shot it with my camera set in full Auto mode. In fact, I walked away from this 528 shot image and let the GigaPan robot and camera work entirely without supervision - something I very rarely do. It's not unusual for me to set the camera in autofocus mode when shooting macroGigaPans, since it is very hard to achieve well focused results at relatively short focal distances combined with a somewhat rough and undulating surface. I was fortunate that only one frame failed to properly focus (top, right of center). If I had monitored the progress of the image I might have caught this failure to focus and reshot the offending frame. What is truly unusual, though, is that I did not fix the exposure. With many panoramas - particularly landscapes - this would be a recipe for a pretty ugly patchwork of photos that show vastly different exposures and obvious transitions where the individual images are stitched. However, in this case there was no dramatic contrast in exposures - rather it was a partly cloudy day and the light was variable, but not sharply contrasting. Rather than fixing the exposure as I normally would, I left the camera in control. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the results. |
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This is a very large roadcut opposite a convenient pullout west of Hague, NY. The rocks exposed here is a metasedimentary gneiss of sillimanite+K-feldspar grade known as kinzigite.
A MacroGigaPan illustrating smaller scale features such as feldspar-cored augen can be seen here: http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=27155 |
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When I set this one up I was aiming to get a nice closeup of a shear zone. What I ended up with was a test of the Gigapan unit under extreme weather conditions. You can almost pick out the individual moment where the snow flurries suddenly turned into a whiteout. In hindsight, I'm amazed that the thing stitched together at all, given how the light changed and how much snow was coming down at the end. |
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This GigaPan illustrates an exposure of the basal Cambrian Potsdam Sandstone nonconformably overlying Precambrian gneisses at the eastern edge of the Adirondack Mts uplift. My field assistants took time out from exploring this remarkable contact to pose for the GigaPan. Berti is standing directly on the unconformity surface and Edi is down among the vertically foliated basement gneisses. One of these days I'll teach one of them to run the GigaPan rig so that I can pose in the pictures myself. ;-) |
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This roadcut, near Alexandria Bay, New York, exposes the "Great Unconformity" between the basal Cambrian Potsdam Sandstone and the underlying Precambrian gneisses of the Frontenac Arch. The unconformity is near the base of the roadcut and can be seen to preserve some evidence of paleotopography on the Cambrian erosion surface. I got finished with this shot in the nick of time. What began as a few raindrops during the last row or two of pictures picked up into quite a downpour by the time I was back in the car and pulling away from the site. |
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Garnets weathering out of a gneiss boulder (Tolland County, CT).
Same boulder as http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=11125, but different angle (and lighting, apparently - less issue with trees, more issue with overexposure, perhaps.) |