You look up the Regent or Dresden Green Diamond in Wikipedia, and find a reasonably informative article on the subject. Or you’re looking over a beautifully printed coffee table book about gems and gemology. The book is heavy and the binding solid and thick. You pore over beautiful photos of 3000 carat topazes and sapphires the size of a quarter. The illustrations are so good you can imagine yourself holding these one-of-a-kind gemstones in your hand.
But when you get to the section on famous diamonds, or look at the Wiki illustrations, all they have are pictures of crummy glass copies, as if they couldn’t even find a CZ copy.
Why is this? Why are the institutions and governments that own these diamonds so adverse to letting publishers have a photo taken of the real thing?
By way of exception, photos the Cullinan Diamond in the crown of Great Britain or the Hope Diamond do seem to be readily available.
I believe that other than the most famous ones, like the British Crown or the Hope Diamond, most of the really good pictures are owned by the photographers who took them, and they expect to be paid when their photos are used.
And while museums could allow others to take pictures of their diamonds, they have to be taken off display and carefully arranged & lighted for good photos (and need a guard standing by) – that costs museums time & money, so they expect to be paid for it.
An amateur photo of the diamond as it’s displayed for viewing would probably still be better than a professional photo of a glass fake, though. Glass can’t get nearly the fire* of a real diamond.
Photographers undoubtedly expect to be paid when their work is published, regardless of the subject. Yet there are plenty of good photos out there of museum quality colored gemstones, and the publishers must have had to work something out with those photographers as well.
This is more than likely the correct answer. It’s easy to forget that Wikipedia, as ubiquitous as it is, remains ultimately a crowd sourced website. It’s the same reason Wikipedia is infamous for having crappy pictures of NBA players in articles. See this hilarious (but true) article on the phenomenon:
I noticed this for Jack Nicklaus’ main pic. You’d think you’d have a glorious shot of either him in the midst of his followthrough, or after he sunk a key putt to win a major, or such, but instead
we have one of him standing at a mike somewhere long after his prime years giving a speech.
I wonder what would happen if I cropped this pic (WARNING large image), and put it into the article-would someone shoot it down ASAP?
Speaking of fire, this might be as good a place as any to show these glass artworks. It’s lead crystal with different light infractions, glued together, then sawn, polished, glued togther again, dozens of times.
It being crowd-sourced isn’t the reason. Wikipedia takes copyright seriously, and will remove images which it can’t legally justify having in in a work it gives away free under very liberal terms. That pretty well makes it impossible to ever have high-quality images someone claims copyright over, given how it interprets fair use law in Florida, where the servers are located.
(And by “how it interprets” I mean “how the lawyers working for the Wikimedia Foundation interpret” the concept, which is necessarily going to be stricter than the “No Copyright Intended” crowd’s take on it, primarily because they understand that copyright has nothing to do with plagiarism and being scrupulous about crediting sources and making disclaimers helps you not a whit.)
Who owns that image and can you get permission from that owner to post it on Wikipedia? If not, then it should be shot down.
Possibly by me, I’m an admin there (though copyright stuff is usually not my forte, I’m more about conflicts of interest, dispute resolution, and hunting down sockpuppets).
That is, if the museum allows photography and if you can overcome the glare of the display case. You almost certainly wouldn’t be able to use flash, not that I’m saying that’s necessarily the best way to photograph gem specimens.
The fact is, photographing gems is fairly difficult and to do it consistently well you have to be a skilled amateur if not a pro. Sometimes I’ve managed to do it well but other times not so much. The opal (second picture), topazes (third and seventh), the cat’s-eye* (fifth and sixth, same stone twice), and the pale aquamarine and morganite (together fourth picture)–all those came out looking fabulous. But the emerald-cut amethyst looks much better IRL than it does here, as does the oval sapphire. The sapphire isn’t of very good quality in the first place so that’s part of the reason I’m sure. But it looks better IRL because my photography isn’t really capturing its luster.
I don’t have any garnets in this album yet, but they always come out practically black, even ones that have good clarity when you look at the actual stones.
I have better gear now so I should probably try these again.
*Quartz cat’s-eye, not a “real” one (chrysoberyl)
Unfortunately, the “photographers want to be paid” explanation doesn’t address the lack of good pictures in “a beautifully printed coffee table book about gems and gemology. The book is heavy and the binding solid and thick. You pore over beautiful photos of 3000 carat topazes and sapphires the size of a quarter. The illustrations are so good you can imagine yourself holding these one-of-a-kind gemstones in your hand.”
Presumably, a publisher putting that much effort into a books visual appeal could find or arrange professional photographs of some of these famous gems.
