I don't know the first thing about lighting a photograph. I carve the thing, I put it in the yard, I take the picture with my phone and it comes out looking like wet gray mud every time.

So Tuesday I dragged a 400 pound basalt piece out into the afternoon sun because that's the only light I've got. Set up on a tarp, phone propped on a bucket. Eleven shots, all bad. Then I turned around to move the bucket and hit the shutter by mistake, and that blurry crooked frame is the only one where you can actually see the chisel marks. It's the one I posted.

My daughter tells me there's a whole science to this. Angles, contrast, some kind of ring light. Maybe. But I've been doing this thirty years and I still can't get a photograph to show what the stone looks like in person, and I've stopped pretending otherwise.

The camera flattens everything. You lose the weight of it. Somebody scrolling past can't feel that the thing weighs more than they do.

Anyway. If anyone's got a trick that doesn't involve buying equipment, I'll listen.