I've been collecting minerals for as long as I can remember, and I worked for a number of years in the mining and exploration industry - mostly gold, diamonds and uranium with a fair sprinkling of pegmatite mining thrown in. I still have involvement with mineral exploration today in various places around the world.
In recent years I have been specialising in micromounts (technically, a mineral specimen fitting into a 25mm square box that requires a microscope to see the crystals). I now have a collection of roughly 17,000 specimens. About a third of these are from Namibia and South Africa, another third from southwestern American (AZ, NM, CO, UT and southern CA), and the remainder from everywhere else.
I spend a fair amount of time taking photomicrographs of this sort of specimen, and some typical examples can be found here.
Jean also collects minerals, specialising in wulfenite. She has a very extensive collection of examples of this mineral.
My recent Mineralogical Magazine paper on the formation of Mendip manganese deposits can be found here. It was originally published in the December 2006 issue.
The book on Mendip manganese mineralogy and deposits that Mike Rumsey and I are writing is well under way, and we're hoping to get it published some time in 2008.