Back to MINERALS FOR SALE
HOW TO ORDER
Order by EMAIL ONLY.
Email to graham@fluoromins.com.au
List the rocks you want with your name, shipping address and phone number. (The shipping company wants your phone number in case of problems)
> > > > > > ORDERS SENT BY MESSENGER (OR SIMILAR) WON’T WORK
Orders will be processed in the order their emails are received. I will indicate sold rocks as soon as possible. If any of the rocks you order are already sold when I received your order I will let you know, and reserve those that are available for you until I hear back from you within 24 hours if you want to order alternatives. I will advise you of the total amount due. Orders will be dispatched as soon as payment is received.
PRICES
For buyers outside Australia all prices are in US dollars.
For Australian buyers the prices are in Australian dollars.
A discount of 5% will be applied to orders over $500 (excluding shipping)
SHIPPING COSTS
Unfortunately shipping from Australia can be expensive. The weight of each specimen is given so you can calculate what the shipping cost will be, whether your order is just one rock, or several. Weights have been rounded up to allow for packaging. For buyers not in Australia I will subsidise the freight costs for orders over 1kg at 50% of the actual rate that I have to pay to send. Subsidised rates (i.e. what you will pay) are shown in red in the table below. For buyers in Australia normal Auspost rates apply.
PAYMENT
Payment from outside Australia: By PayPal to graham@fluoromins.com.au
Payment in Australia: Direct Bank Deposit if you can. Otherwise PayPal is OK.
I will send my bank details when I reply to your order.
To be fair to everyone, payment needs to be received within 24 hours of your order (or amended order) being placed, otherwise the sale may be voided.
THE ROCKS
Be aware that some of the rocks are small, some are large. A US Quarter Dollar or $1 bill gives scale. You may want to add small pieces to your order to bring it up close to shipping cut-off weights as shown in the table above.
Many rocks, especially from Puttapa, have so many colours it is not possible to say precisely what minerals are present.
BRIGHTNESS
All the photos were taken with the UV sources up as close as possible, resulting in bright photos. I try to match the image brightness to the brightness I observe.
To get the brightness shown in some of my photos you may need to have the specimen close to your UV source. This is because some Australian specimens require fairly strong UV to bring out the many colours and patterns.
CLOSE-UPs
Photos in which you can’t see the whole rock are close-ups i.e. zoomed in. Many of these rocks have quite spectacular features that are too small to be seen by the naked eye. But those features are there and can be seen by photographing them. Sometimes serious magnification and therefore extra exposure is needed. The brightness of a close-up photo does not necessarily reflect the brightness of the fluorescence of the whole rock. I’ve included the close-ups so you can know more about your rock, and appreciate the extra beauty that’s there even if it’s too small to see. Just like you can see the stars, but you know there are amazing galaxies in the sky above you and you can’t see them without a telescope. If you can take your own close-ups many of these uniquely Australian rocks will provide hours of fascinating photography and many beautiful photos – let your camera wander over the surface of the rock and find spots for great photos.
PHOSPHORESCENCE – or AFTERGLOW
Almost all the Puttapa, Aroona and Third Plain rocks contain willemite and so are phosphorescent. Other minerals, e.g. aragonite may also phosphoresce. Some specimens with willemite show strong, very long-lasting phosphorescence. Some Puttapa and Third Plain rocks fluoresce and phosphoresce in completely different colours under SW and LW.
Your eye sees things in real time, so you only get a brief fading view of phosphorescence, but it can continue long after it is too dim to be seen – weeks or even months in some exceptional cases. The camera, however, allows light to accumulate while the shutter is open and so a static image is built up. The shutter was open for up to 30 seconds for my phosphorescence photos. Because you can only see it for a few seconds or less, there are no rules on how long to expose a photo. So there are no rules about how bright a phosphorescence photo should be. I and most people just expose for long enough to get a nice photo. Therefore, do not expect the brightness of a rock’s fluorescence necessarily to be the same as the brightness of its phosphorescence photos.
[For Mathematics gurus, if you graph the brightness of the phosphorescence against time, the amount of light that has built up to create the image to time t is given by the area under the curve to time t.]
FOCUS STACKING
It is difficult to get all of a picture in perfect focus, especially in close-ups. In “focus stacking”, the camera automatically takes multiple photos, each with a slightly different part in perfect focus, then those photos are combined in the computer using the in-focus parts of each one. All my photos use focus stacking, with the number of photos in each stack ranging from about 10 to over 100. [I use Helicon Remote and Helicon Focus software.]
ENQUIRIES
Enquiries are welcome.
Phone: Australia: 0408 372 737. Overseas: Your international dialling code, then 61 408 372 737. Email: graham@fluoromins.com.au
Thanks,
Graham Fraser
651 Hydes Ck Rd
Hydes Creek NSW 2454
AUSTRALIA.