Me and a few others took a trip into an old Iron mine in Cornwall (which shal remain nameless to keep the land owner sweet!) on a Photography trip.

I have a set of 5 RGB battery 10 watt lamps which I have modified to "wash". I position the lamps and can adjust the colours by remote control.

The walls were covered in a yellow/orange ochre and I found whilst flicking through colours that it was fluorescing bright red/pink under certain lighting wavelengths.

I know certain minerals do fluoresce, and I had a blacklight torch with me and that produced nothing! this seemed to react to a UV closer to that produced by a sun bed tube (purple).

I tell you now I have never seen anything like it in my life, it was amazing to see! I took lots of pictures and short video, neither do them justice!

I plan on going back to do a better video and some more pictures in the not too distant future!

[youtube]iTLrxB7oLsA[/youtube]

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First with one colour, the mine went red...

[photo]Personal-Album-12273-Image-93063[/photo]

Second with the purple/uv the mine went pink!

[photo]Personal-Album-12273-Image-93061[/photo]

And one with me!

[photo]Personal-Album-12273-Image-93062[/photo]

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That's amazing - even though the video can't display it, the fact that the camera chip freaks out when you get close says it all.

Maybe some HDR-type (High Dynamic Range) photos might capture more of the fluorescence? As in, multiple tripod shots with bracketed exposures 2 or 3 times under and over-exposed, and then stacked together to either create a full HDR, or a tone-mapped 'normal' image. It may be that a stills camera chip will just lock out too, but may be worth a try using software to try and beat the limitations.

I use a little program called TuFuse to algorithmically stack mine, but Photoshop does a similar thing blending auto-masked layers.

The camera freaking out is the LED chips blending using PWM and the shutter speed adjusing automaitally which creates the artefact.

I have a good camcorder and will be taking a red epic dragon down there later in the year and getting some 6k video!

I didnt have time to play properly as the trip was only supposed to be an hour or two at max, but when we discovered this there was a certain amount of fascination, excitement and experimentation! I cant wait for the next trip! I expect it will be kind of popular!

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Holy moly, a red dragon!? Those low light shots will be TV broadcast worthy! Can't wait to see it!

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Moons ago Miles made me a trustfire lamp with a UV emitter, when it worked (briefly) I managed to get good results of calcite florescence - VERY freaky!!

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