Macro Monday 12, contest, diamonds

I was thinking Sunday midnight for the entries to close on the contest, but the actual text says Monday at midnight. Oops. That's today for those that have are reading this now. Which could lead me down the rabbit hole of discussing what 'now' means in an asynchronous world, but we won't go there. Today. Maybe a different now. For all I know 'now' I'll come back in the future and put a link there.

So, one more last clue, a somewhat less zoomed in version of the object. Scroll down.

Wine diamonds are rarely found in commercial wine. They are made up from Tartaric acid binding with potassium, and are generally held to be an indicator the grapes were on the vine longer, and the wine fermented longer. The red ones have just been stained by the sediment.

What puzzles me is why the red ones are curved and ridged, but the white ones are more crystalline. In any case, they're tiny. These were not attached to the cork, so I had to figure out how to get them positioned and stable so I could capture the images. These are all at between 4 and 5x mag.

I managed to get them set up so that some of the crystals were in the morning sun, plus an LED light, plus the macro flash of course. The combination sometimes produced a lovely glow that doesn't really come across well in the photos. By the time I got to some of the other crystals the sun had moved.

And your last, really, no fooling, not kidding around this time, clue. Remember, several other recent blog posts have clues, most particularly, this one. Remember, the prize is to choose one of my 35K plus images and get a file suitable for a desktop screen or printing out fairly big, though the printing is on your dime, but printing is cheap. Many of mine will look lovely on canvas and then you don't need to frame, though putting canvas in a float frame looks stunningly good.

It just occurred to me that my out of town readers will not get quite as wide a selection, unless they want to come here. In that case I'll roll out the red carpet. But they can choose between any of mine that have appeared in this blog over the last year and a half or so, or more recently on my photoblog. Most of the images on Facebook or Instagram came through my good camera, but not all. We'll work something out.