Teaching with Digital 3D Models of Minerals and Rocks

Abstract

We use a small photography set-up consisting of a 30 cm-across, square, white, plastic Lazy-Susan turntable, a 50 cm-across, cubic, fabric lightbox with three LED ring lights, and an 18.4 MP Sony DSC-HX80 compact digital camera mounted on a simple tripod. We use a matte black background in the lightbox with pastel white filters on the LED lights. The turntable is marked-up with pairs of colored dots in the corners and approximately halfway towards the center; these are used to assist manual registration of images. Samples up to 40 cm-diameter can be accommodated but we generally restrict ourselves to samples less than 25 cm-diameter to enable use of the registration marks on the turntable.