Giant Blocks of Sugar Rocks

This is a sugar crystal. A big one. This sucker was about 4 or 5cm across. I like the misty blue effect along the top of the crystal in the photo above. This is actually a simple light smear due to camera shake.

The colors in these photos are from Legos that surrounded the sugar crystals when I was shooting. Crystals pickup the reflected tones, shadows and light that surround them. I was intrigued by the textures on/in the crystals that looked like rain on a window.

I love the geometric-ness of many of the crystals we grew. I made them with the kids by making a super-saturated solution of sugar and water, then we placed sticks in it and waited, and waited... and waited.

It took about three weeks for us to get pretty good sticks encrusted with big, blocky crystals. I was surprised it took so long, all the online tutorials for growing great sugar crystals made it sound like it was a much faster process. We also saw a lot of extra crystal growth on the bottom of the cups. I think this happened because we must have had a little un-dissolved sugar in the solution.

Below are the crystal-encrusted sticks we grew, and from which these photos have come.

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Pinpoint

This the the pin, stuck into the skin of my thumb. I know, it's kind of gross, but I wanted to see what it would look like.

Below is the pin point, without my thumb. Below that is a closer crop of the tip.

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Weird Beach Thing #2

We found this on a beach on Long Island and it is just so bizarre. It is about the size of a silver dollar, matte black, pointy, and very hard. However it is light, like it's hollow inside.

At first, I thought it was a strange squished blob of tar that had hardened, or a piece of a toy that had snapped off. I briefly thought it might be an alien egg casing, planted on Long Island so they may begin their takeover of Earth there.

But the bristly strange circular opening makes me think none of these guesses are correct.

Now, I think it's likely a seed casing for weird underwater plants. But i've never seen anything like this before. It's truly bizarre.

{CORRECTION: Thanks to a lead from Kenon, we now know this is a water chestnut seed, apparently reeking havoc to underwater plantlife here in the northeast.}

If you have any idea at all what this could be, let me know!

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Hardware Day!

A wood screw tip.

Today, I shot some hardware. You can see some optical distortion in the photo below, as the screw threads seem to bend inward the further they get from the center of my lens. This is an artifact of my janky stack of lenses, and would not be present were I using a far better lens.

Another screw tip, slightly distorted.

Below, not suspension bridge cable, rather the frayed end of thin-gauge picture hanging wire.

Picture hanging wire.

A nail tip.

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