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Holy Photography Breakthroughs, Batman!!

Sometimes you stumble across things by accident. image

I've been complaining quite a bit as of late about the difficulty I've been having when attempting to photograph proof and PL coins. I've just not been able to make any progress at all, and have been very unhappy with the results.

Today I received a lovely German 3M cameo proof from Ron Guth (quite a few of the loveliest proofs in my collection have come courtesy of Ron). For reference, it's an NGC PF63 CAMEO.

So I'm trying all sorts of angles and distances with my Ott Light. After about 20 shots the best I was able to get was the following:

imageimage


Not real happy with it. It's murky and only partially showcases the cameo, yet I cannot lighten up the photo after the fact since then all the surface anomalies come through.

So I reset my camera from an angle to a straight-on shot. Still no major difference.

But then, for whatever reason, I placed the Ott Light down facing AWAY from the coin. As I bring my hand up to grab the lamp, the light is reflected off my hand into the camera viewfinder... whoa! contrast! It's washed out, but the contrast is definitely there.

So I pull the images into Photoshop, crop them, and do a single Auto-Color (Ctrl + Shift + b). What I got was the following:

imageimage


Talk about a world of difference!

For giggles, I thought I'd reimage one of the Swiss 5 Francs that I got from Bluemoon that was PL, just to see what kind of a difference it would make:

Old pictures:

imageimage


New method:

imageimage


This new method REALLY emphasizes different characteristics of the coin. I'm not sure it's a step up in ALL cases, nor am I sure what the results be on less flashy/lustrous coins, but I think I'll experiment some more and reimage some of my proofs...

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