This was such a great specimen of matlockite from Derbyshire, in the American Museum of Natural History, that it broke my heart when I got home and found it so blurry. I was surprised when it was accepted in the public galleries.

The Newmont "blob".

One of my greatest photo regrets. The Newmont azurite is as fine as any azurite gets but my photo has it looking like a sorry mass of oily black goethite. Heck, the matrix looks better than the azurite!

As it’s the close of the decade, and as at least one contestant requested, I should announce a loser to this point. Or rather, losers. There are more than one of you. In fact some lose at losing to start with, as there were several pictures contributed that seemed rather good to me.
Although ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, clearly, photos which are merely plain and utilitarian, yet still useful, are not ugly. And different styles of ugliness are possible, such as flagrant demonstrations of technical ineptitude, horrid backgrounds and other acts of bad taste, and of course brutish, grotesque specimens. My choices are:

Worst use of light As photography is often called painting with light, this can get ugly. Runner-up is Jolyon’s brooding, dark creation, but the loser must be Jake Harper’s photo of a magnificent azurite specimen, which managed to capture exactly one (oversaturated) crystal reflection. Special mention must be made of Kelly Nash’s out-of-focus matlockite, which is another notable misuse of light.

Bad Taste As pictures including fingers or colored sticky tags pointing at the mineral, etc. were not submitted, we are left with studies in Background Absurdity. I calculate the indifferent amethyst by Martin Rice to be 93% background, which is certainly absurd. But it lacks the Caravaggio-like shock effect of Norman King’s halite. I can’t unsee that.

Why? A special, and highly competitive category. Kyle Beucke takes the bronze for a high-mag pic that could have been of anything. Scott Sadlocha’s trio of photos looks sourced from a site where there might be mineral specimens. But even avoiding obvious scatological puns, Ralph Bottrill’s faintly repellant, barely-lithified guano photo is one we can quickly pass on. 

Grotesque I thought perhaps that my own orpiment/anorpiment cabinet specimen, which I started this thread with, would stand unchallenged in this category. John Montgomery’s is a fine example of a mineral horribly twisted by late deformation. But I yield the field to Modris Baum’s dawsonite specimen, which looks exactly like wolf excrement, white with bits of bone and dark with other stuff. I could not put that on my shelf.

Happy 2020 everyone!

Tony