Please critique this photograph

ColonialCoinUnion

Best I can tell, its either slightly too dark or too light, and / or slightly out of focus. On the other hand, I do not believe this coin is AT.

fc

it appears it is a good pic, it is just that your subject is so
darn tough. how about a larger view of that coin? double
the size for us to see.

also, the wear makes it harder to see detail.. it appears to be
one solid color overall with varying degrees of lightness or darkness.

291fifth

The photo is overexposed. The actual coin will be much darker. I suspect it is original but I'm no expert in this series.

Steve27

The coin is probably a little darker than the pic shows, but looks good. My guess is that it's in an old PCGS holder, which is why the coin is slightly turned in the slab.

mgoodm3

Getting a little glare at the top of the image and a little overexposed. I prefer to drop the angle of the light some on worn colonials and only use one lamp, get a little better contrast and less glare.

xbob

Sometimes lots can be fixed in Photoshop to try to match the coin in hand view.

I opened your image and looked at the levels. Notice below. If you bracket the histogram (black area of the graph) between the arrows it fixes lighting issues in many cases.
Red highlight indicates where I moved the left bracket to.



Then I selected the coin. Inversed the selection and filled with black. That is just my own personal preference with coin pics.
I also used the filter 'unsharp mask' at 25% to sharpen the detail slightly.

The result:


Is that closer to how it looks?

ColonialCoinUnion

xbob, your image is slightly darker than the coin in hand (but more accurate than my shot).

FYI, this was shot using a Nikon D70, 60mm macro lens and a Sigma ring light which I have obviously not mastered yet. The AT comment was a Peace-Dollarian joke by the way - this thing is just an original old copper.

mgoodm3

I think that a ring light provides a bit too diffuse light to show the contrast well for dark copper. You may try to tape off portions of the ring light to make it a bit more directional.

MikeInFL

As others have pointed out, your photo is overexposed and there looks to be glare coming off the slab.

Also, I would lose the ringlight. Try multiple lights to increase the contrast. With dark copper that lacks contrast, I find sometimes that multiple lights works much better than a single light.

Hope this helps...Mike