Playing with the camera...

JCMhouston

Sitting around playing with a camera my youngest daughter left at the house, It's a 10 mp Sony A230 (one of the cheaper SLR's) and I got to thinking I have a bunch of old Minolta AF lenses laying around that should fit this. I got out the old 50mm f1.7 and 135 f2.8 and sure enough they fit and seem to work ok. These give an effective focal length of 75mm and around 200mm with the APSC sensor in the Sony, neither are macro lenses so you have to get a bit of distance. Even so with the 50mm I was able to crop halfpennies at 625 pixels, pennies at 751 pixels, and a Double Florin gave 874 pixels. I normally resize the full size images down to 600x600 so this works well. I also tried a new light setup, a single 75 W Sylvania daylight balanced bulb with a white piece of paper as a reflector on the opposite side, the white balance in the camera set to 4600 K seems to give the most realistic image. Needless to say the new image is a much better representation of the coin.

Before picture (this image is a year or two old):



After:

theboz11

Might I suggest trying a black background shot. White overwhelms silver,IMHO.

JCMhouston

Unfortunately I am not smart enough to figure out how to change the background color.

Zohar

JCMhouston

Well thanks Zohar, I guess I could pay up to a nickel a piece if you want to convert them all for me. That does look very nice, but I don't use photoshop, every time I think about buying it a coin comes up for sale I need.

theboz11

I meant use a Black background to Lay the coin upon when taking the shot.

DorkGirl

<< <i>I meant use a Black background to Lay the coin upon when taking the shot. >>

JCMhouston

Well, the coin is in a slab, so I really don't see what a black background would do for me.