FINAL COLLECTION
Frank Daniels © 2020-2025
It’s time to find new homes for my collection. With this end in mind, I spent more than three years organizing and describing the individual specimens, exercising extreme care to ensure this collection includes only the best of the best. My focus is on beauty, character, and perfection. I am holding nothing top quality back.
The collection comprises mostly cabinet sized, remarkably perfect, repeatedly beautiful, frequently awe-inspiring, chiefly gem quality, exquisite natural sculptures, specimens of trees that grew tens to hundreds of millions of years ago. Unfathomably rare in this state of mineralization and perfection. The vast majority of the pieces contain no glue or fillers of any kind. Gem Quality and Museum Quality only. It took me almost forty years to assemble this collection.
Many of the specimens are featured in my books, Petrified Wood, published in 1998, and Ancient Forests, published in 2006.
To see the collection, click here
Notes and essays pertinent to the collection
Questions: email: [email protected]
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Images are captured with Pentax 35 mm DSLR cameras and Pentax all-glass 50 and 100 mm macro lenses. Lighting is daylight balanced LED. My goal is to capture what the specimen actually looks like under proper display lighting, which ideally equals sunlight. In decades past I used actual sunlight by chasing it from window to window, but modern lights are far easier to use and are approximately equivalent in color values. I corrected each image as close as possible to appear as it looks under direct sunlight. I often move lights to decrease glare and otherwise improve images. My display cases use 50 watt tungsten daylight bulbs. To fully appreciate each specimen, there is no substitute to sitting down in a comfortable chair with good light and plenty of time, holding it in your hand, turning it in the light, examining it from every angle, realizing its heft and its energy. As an experienced collector, I came into collecting fossil woods with a degree of understanding that which aided me substantially while forming this collection, basically that perfect is best.