"Photographing different minerals and gemstones is often a great challenge that most photographers are not up to. One of the problems is color. There are known trouble makers such as emerald which likes to turn a yellowish, khaki green if not treated right. That means using daylight film and studio flash to best approximate the true color. Fluorite comes in almost every color imaginable but one of the rarest and definitely most difficult to photograph is blue fluorite. If tungsten film is used, it turns a sickly grayish purple. With flash and daylight film it is purple with just the slightest hint of blue. For years it has frustrated me in spite of trying every light and film combination possible. It was less than one year ago that I finally met with success, and I owe it to a technology I put off using for a long time - digital photography. A digital camera combined with studio flash gave me a pretty good blue, but I got a great blue when I used special digital lighting.

Other problem stones are those that exhibit color change such as alexandrite, which always come out red no matter what light and film you use.  When Murat Akgun brought me the cut Zultanite™ stones and showed me their color change I was impressed.  I also thought that I had the secret weapon to deal with them.  Wrong!  The tungsten film (Kodak Ektachrome 64T) produced too much of a yellow tint but the daylight film (Fuji Velvia 100) did a reasonable job capturing the pinkish brown  for the tungsten rendition.  I thought that the digital camera with digital lighting would capture the mint color of daylight.  The color was green, but lighter and not as rich as it should have been. 

Luckily, there is one last resort that technology offers - photoshop.  With just a little bit of work, the images can be tweaked to accurately represent the true, beautiful color of Zultanite™ in day light.  If anyone has had greater success recording such elusive colors, I would appreciate hearing about it."