Primer: The easy (and cheap!) way to good coin photos

nwcs

I thought I would produce a quickie guide for the board on taking good pictures on the cheap. I hope it is useful for you. This won't make you a professional, but I hope it provides just enough oomph to make you happy you bought that digital camera! While some of this detail is my own, some of it is gleaned from the advice of many board members that I've read. Part of the credit belongs to them. People like shylock, coppercoins, and K6AZ, among others.

You'll need:
3 desk lamps (I used $8.88 ones from walmart)
3 sheets of typing paper
3 normal tungsten lights at 60 watts (4 GE soft whites: $1.50)
1 black felt pad ($1 at walmart)
1 digital camera with macro mode

Initial setup:
Set up your lights around the black felt pad in this type of pattern (ignore the dots):

..........................LAMP



.........LAMP.........FELT................LAMP
........................CAMERA

Put the bases of the desk lamps about 6-10 inches away from the felt and aim the light at about a 45 degree angle towards the felt. Cover the front of the lamp with the typing paper. Be sure not to let the paper touch the bulb and leave a little of the front uncovered so that some heat can escape. Don't leave the lights on for a long, long time though - or unattended - because it is a lot of heat and it is paper, so there is always that remote possibility that something can go wrong.

Camera setup:
Your camera needs to be able to point down. If you have a camera with a rotating lens (like the ricoh rdc 4300) then you just need to point the lens. Put the camera on a travel tripod or other tripod/device that lets you aim it really close (about 2-6 inches away) and steady.

Set the camera's white balance (sometimes called light source) to tungsten. Set the camera into macro mode. Set the exposure compensation to +1.0 EV (you might need to play with this value). You need to increase the exposure compensation because you are shooting a bright subject (coin) against a dark background (felt)

Set your camera to take the biggest photos with the least compression. In other words, the setting that takes the fewest number of pictures at the biggest size. You need the pixels to play with.

Next
Center the coin and take the picture. Import the picture to your favorite photo editing program and crop to size, etc. You're done!

With a little practice (and experiment!), it takes no time making pics like this:

bulloncoins

Thank you for this post. It is so informative and very straight forward. When I am ready to experiment I have a great guide.

mbbiker

WOW, great post sounds easy enough and the results are amazing that is by far the best picture i've seen of that coin that shows mirrors, color, and detail. Looks like i'm going to wal-mart tommorow.

Lakesammman

Good post - can't wait to try it out. The paper will probably make more light necessary, so will try the 100W bulbs and override the auto mode to lighten the image a touch. Have you found that necessary?? Is this good on all comers or just certain coins like high mirror proofs?? I sure like the cartwheel effect on some coins shot w/o the paper.

Clankeye

Real good post, Neil. Thanks for the other informative posts of the last few days designed to help newcomers here. Bravo.

Clankeye

nwcs

Well, the 100 watt bulbs aren't as necessary as you think. With this setup, 60 watts is more than enough. The exposure compensation needs to be there regardless because of the reflection of the coin. It makes the auto compensation tone it down too much. And, actually, I have done no retouching of the photos the last few days. They've been quite good without it. So far this setup has been great for larger silver coins, business strike or proof. Copper is much harder. And nickel needs a little tweaking. Gold, though, seems to to work as well as silver. The cartwheel is always apparent, though. Just a matter of how much you want it to show.

Outhaul

Now THIS is a great post! You can always rely on Neil.

Cheers,

Bob

ksteelheader

That is some good info! I do, however, have a question. I have heard some discussion about reveal lights. Do you or anyone else have any experience or info about them?.........Thanks, Ken

WACoinGuy

Thanks for the great post! I tried fooling around with my camera today to take some pictures -- I still need to get the lights set up as you described, but already I'm noticing a remarkable difference in the pictures I'm taking. For example, here's a picture of an 1876 twenty cent piece (warning: images are large -- I don't have my photo editing software at home, so don't try looking at these with a slow connection):

Obverse
Reverse

And for comparison, here's a scan of the same coin:

Scan

The scan is much smaller than the pictures, and I still don't have the lighting setup properly (you can see the upper left of the pictures comes a bit fuzzier), but I think this gives a pretty good contrast of scanned coins versus photographed. When I get around to getting the lighting set up, I'll post another picture...

Askari

Thanks, Neil!! This is a great and valuable thread!!

dddangerousdan

Someone posted this link here a while ago. I learned a few things from it.

digital coin photography

DAN

danglen

I learned this trick from board member Scott Carlson. Instead of using paper as a light shield, I bought an opaque salad bowl at Walmart. Transluscent, but not transparent. (I actually had to buy an eight bowl set, but for $2.49 I figured it was worth it. Besides, I now have seven Christmas present ready to go. Just kidding ) Cut out the bottom of the salad bowl, and when you're ready to shoot, just place the bowl over the coin. Works like a charm and eliminates the fire hazard.

Casey

Excellent post, thanks for the tips. I'm heading to the store for supplies soon.

nwcs

>That is some good info! I do, however, have a question. I have heard some discussion about reveal lights. Do you or anyone else have any experience or info about them?.........

Reveal bulbs aren't necessary. They just add some blue back into the yellow-based tungsten light. The thing is, many digital cameras have white balance settings. What this does is to (put simply) recalibrate the image to the light source. When doing a controlled lighting like this, the auto setting doesn't work well. Putting the white balance to the type of light you're actually using clears up almost all of the issues.

When I first started learning coin photography, I used reveal bulbs. Now they're in the lamps around the house.

As for the salad bowl... Definitely, if you find alternatives to the paper that gives you a similar effect, it's a good thing. Since I only keep the lights on about 5-10 minutes at a time, I don't worry about it and go cheaper.

ms70

Thanks for some good info!!

DesertLizard

Best primer on pix taking I have seen! Thanks!

shylock

Great info NWCS. I got a kick out of Danglen's post. A $225 salad bowl can be bought here if anyone's interested.

Lakesammman

Shylock:

Thought there would be a link to your ebay auction... It's a $3 salad bowl, $220 for labor to cut the hole??

I'm still not getting very good proof pictures. Here's proof positive of that. The top is with raw reveal lights. The bottom is with paper over the lights. It looks flat and washed out. Both taken with manual white balance, the bottom lighter by one step. If anyone can let me know how to catch the reflectivity of proof copper, I would sure appreciate it.

Lakesammman

Here's another good example of what a difference lighting and camera angle make. Same coin, just different by angling the lense slightly with very similar lighting. It's interesting I can't reproduce the toned picture now that the coin is in a slab. Best to get the pics before being slabbed, as noted in other threads/links.

cointime

Some really great ideas. I knew my shots needed some work. Cool

Ken

JoyofCollecting

I've been waiting for thread like this for a very long time. Thanks so much!!

coinlover

Awesome post! Thanks for taking the time to put that information together. Hopefully it will improve my

pics. Toning has been the hardest to capture. Nice work on the 80-S.



karen

MacCoin

Darm I left the lights on to long anyone know a good way to get melted felt off morgans?

redhott

THANK YOU!!!! nwcs, for a very thoughtful and most enlightening post.

dweeberlord

Thanks for the info, I will be trying it out tomorrow. Anybody know how Anaconda takes his pictures?

nwcs

TTT

I also found that lowering the exposure compensation to -0.5 to -1.0 EV works well in this setup with proof coins.

coindaughter

Thank you thank you thank you. I'll expirament tomorrow. I've been struggling mightily, and now I have a roadmap.

THANK YOU!