I have been reading the Picture of the Day feed from Wikimedia Commons for about a month, now, and it is fast becoming one of the best parts of my daily newsreader experience. Every day there’s a gorgeous new publicly-licensed photograph pre-selected for quality by a vote amongst Wikimedia community members.

That’s how I happened upon the work of German inorganic chemist and photographer alchemist-hp (English-language page). She or he takes amazing photographs of element, mineral, and chemical samples and has a stated goal (badly translated by yours truly) “to create special pictures of all naturally occurring elements.”

More:

• Gorgeous bismuth crystal
• Metallurgical eye candy