The Royal Ontario Museum had the world’s third largest diamond on display, so I paid a visit to the ROM with a couple of friends before it left. Overall, the experience was fun (good company!), but the regular exhibits of the ROM provided a much more interesting visit (and photo op!) than the special diamond exhibit.
It doesn’t help that photographs weren’t allowed in the diamond exhibit, and while there were plenty of diamonds on display, most of them didn’t look that interesting in the lighting. I was a bit surprised; I was expecting the kind of sparkle and fire that they have at diamond stores. Instead many of the rocks looked “flat”, despite the impressive pedigree on their certificate.
The Incomparable Diamond itself was ho-hum… After a certain size, it gets so surreal, I start thinking of them as glass or crystal at best! The most memorable diamond for me was an engagement ring from Tiffany’s: a six-prong, brilliant cut, probably a 3 carat D IF or at least close to it. Tiffany’s may be overpriced, but some of their stuff sure looks good!
The rest fo the museum was pretty interesting, although getting good lighting was a problem. I particularly enjoyed my time with the dinosaur fossils, probably because I got a chance to do some photography experiments.
For this mastodon, I manually reduced the flash to lighten the shadows enough for some details, but no more; practising the technique I tried at the Hong Kong Museum of History.
Recalling the director’s commentary from the Lord of the Rings DVD set, I thought about trying some “forced perspective”, offering up my poor companion to the jaws of this T-Rex. Idea was reasonably sound, except for one small snafu: my on-camera flash (manually set) will lighten up the foreground subject, but I need a second remote flash to lighten up the T-Rex the same way! It’s way too far to be affected by my on-camera flash, especially at low powers.
I also wanted a photograph suggestive of what it might have felt like being selected to be T-Rex’s lunch. Took me a few tries, but I was happy with the result. When I look at this picture, my gaze is drawn toward that open maw and the rows of sharp teeth: probably what most of T-Rex’s meals were looking at in their last moments, too.
For the complete set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/relgar/sets/72157616678887642/
Thankfully, the results did not disappoint, and bordered on magical. Here’s a before/after of probably the noisiest picture I had from the night (no flash, ISO1600, f/1.4):
