I've been promising myself a jeweler's loupe for about three years now. Time to act!

Thanks, Greene!

You're welcome and please, please try to keep your new loupe clean. You can see how filthy mine is.

Edit to add:

The one used for that 'idea' was about $26 here:
http://www.opticsplanet.com/ba...

If I were to spend money for a new magnifier, I would buy a lens on an adjustable goose neck - one with LED lighting. I would also buy a 'third hand' to hold the plant material.

I also own several watchmakers loupe in various magnifications - like this:
http://landainternational.com/...
Those don't help for taking photos, just for looking at details.

To be honest, I probably won't use this the way you are; I was just taking this as a reminder. I am a crystal collector of sorts and some of those, with a loupe you can see a great deal more than you can with the naked eye. I had decided on a 10x to start, but that was several years ago and life intervened.

Yes, I understand.

Oh, my! Well, what I do is nothing so organized as that, but I do like to be able to peer in there! I can imagine that for faceting and cabbing (do we say cabbing? I don't know!), seeing smaller detail would be critical.

Neat!

'Cabbing' is a lovely word. Several mineralogical societies offer classes in 'cabbing', so yes, it is a good word.

I only shortened it to 'cab' earlier because I was too lazy to learn French in school.

All this has nothing to do with my photography tip, but I felt like rambling on a bit.

I find spellcheck highly annoying, frankly.

I never knew what a cabuchon was until I got interested in Tiger Iron (not eye, iron) and found a nice slab on Amazon for $15 that the seller said was "ready for cabbing" and I had to look it up! Oh, cabuchon, oh right, I get it! LOL!

I did buy the slab and it was lovely except he'd put a big ole piece of masking tape across the entire piece and I never could get the adhesive off. Of course if I'd been going to polish it and cut it and make jewelry it would not have been an issue. Then, I moved, and it broke into several pieces because I didn't pack it well enough. But they are still lovely!

/ramble also

(We are getting farther away from the original idea.)

Yes we are, but consider this: If that mineralogist had had a side business selling loupes, he could have suggested that everyone who bought one of his pieces also purchase a loupe, so they could detect the finer layers of color!




Well, it was worth a try.

However, I imagine that, once one owns an item such as a loupe, one easily finds more and more clever applications of its use, just like you have.

(There. That's a bit better.)