I started collecting fossils when I was 10 years old, during holidays on the Normandy coast.
In 1977, following an article published in the magazine Minéraux & Fossiles, I started a collection of Micromounts.

At the same time, having little means, I tinkered with microscope tubes to make a handmade microscope.
In the same year, I met Pierre Gatel at the Paris-Hilton mineral exchange, he introduced me to his methods of research and manufacturing micromounts.

He also introduced me to Jean-Claude Boulliard, who would become a few years later curator of the famous mineralogy collection at the University of Paris Sorbonne, directed at the time by Pierre Bariand.

Jean-Claude Boulliard introduced me to Pierre Bariand, who introduced me to Don Miguel Romero Sanchez, who invited me to his house in the summer of 1983, met his family and showed me his museum in Tehuacán in Mexico.

Alain Carion, seller and researcher of minerals and meteorites in Paris, thanks to Jean-Claude Boulliard, will employ me as a collaborator between 1983 and 1984.
With him, I would make expeditions to Morocco, and to the great European exhibitions, Paris, Brussels, Munich, Bordeaux, Lyon and of course Tucson.

At the same time I met Jean-François Poullen, who was the curator of the collection of the Ecole des Mines de Paris, I had some swaps with him and I had a private tour of this very beautiful collection.

Pierre Gatel created the AFM, the French Association of Micromineralogy, in December 1984. I was one of the first members but I had to leave Paris in 1985 for professional reasons.

Passionate about photography since high school, I have tried several techniques for micromount macro photography, from the modified photo enlarger with a bellows, to the adapters mounted on the lenses of the many binocular loupes that I have tested over the years.

On my Mindat site, there are still some photos taken with the technique of adapters mounted on a microscope tube, but this is not the best solution, because the mirrors that reflect light in these binocular loupes distort the optical path, and the photos are not optimally sharp.

In 2018,I found a better solution in the system that Rainer Ernst made, and bought a StackUnit from him,fully motorized and computer-controlled, allowing me to take photos for stacking with intermediate steps as small as 0.0001 mm ! .

Coupled with the optical zoom of my Sony Alpha 7R IV, I now get sharp photos with a field of view down to 0.30 mm (!), through a Mitutoyo turret with 4 Mitutoyo Plan Apo metallographic objectives X2 ,X5 ,X10 ,X20 (and X20 SL & X50 SL since october 2025).

October 2025: Testing the Mitutoyo M Plan Apochromatic X50 Super Long Working Distance metallographic lens, coupled with either the optical or digital zoom of the Sony Alpha 7R IV A. Improved sharpness at field of view less than 1 mm. New field of view with this objective: from 0.70 mm to 0.11 mm.

February 2026: 2825 photos updated with improved sharpness and descriptions.