5 cents and photography...

Numiven

I am a young collector, have been experimenting with numismatic photography for a while now and I am improving every day!

I spend a good chunk of time sitting with my coins, camera, lights and computer, experimenting on and on..love every second of it!

I thank all the members here who pointed me to right directions with excellent feedback.
I am here to show my new buys and my take on photographing it, i will appreciate feebacak on where I can improve in photographing coins.

dmwest

damn good in my opinion. wish I could do that with mine...

silverpop

looking good

messydesk

Looks good so far. Some really minor things (one could say nitpicking) regarding the pictures. First, the sharpness feels just a little off. If you can focus manually, this might help you get the critical focus you need. Don't rely on a small aperture for depth of field too much, because this will reduce the sharpness in your photos. Don't be afraid of a little sharpening in post-processing, either. Do this after resizing your picture to the size you want. Second, and this may be my current monitor speaking, is that the white balance doesn't quite seem perfect, especially on the Shield nickel. Currently, I'm using a credit card-sized "WhiBal" card for white balance calibration. I think it works better than a gray card, which is most useful for exposure. Finally, use some horizontal and vertical guides in post-processing to make sure your coins aren't tilted. Many types have pretty good symmetry or horizontal and vertical lines that make it easy to rotate consistently. You'll find, however, that some types don't have the symmetry you think they do.

Numiven

Thank you!

Gotcha.. I will work on those lines..

Not sure what to do to get sharpness, i zoom in, manually focus to get optimum sharpness, but i feel my mirror vibrates the setup when taking pictures. I am at 1/200Q, f5.6

@messydesk Any tips to improve sharpness? Better lens?

will this shaprness work for prints 8×10?

Eagleguy

Looks real good. How do they compare to what you see in-hand?

golden

Very nice. I wish that I could do half as good.

Numiven

@Eagleguy said:
Looks real good. How do they compare to what you see in-hand?

I make sure it looks as close as possible to holding it in hand under the lamp. So, yes, it does look like this image...

Holding it in hand (even under light) some small marks etc that you see on the photos are not visible making it look smoother /nicer in hand!

Kudbegud

Nice job. Much better than a lot of photos I've seen.

1630Boston

Very nice IMO

messydesk

@Numiven said:
...

Not sure what to do to get sharpness, i zoom in, manually focus to get optimum sharpness, but i feel my mirror vibrates the setup when taking pictures. I am at 1/200Q, f5.6

@messydesk Any tips to improve sharpness? Better lens?

will this shaprness work for prints 8×10?

What is the camera/lens combination you're currently using? If you're at 1/200 sec., the mirror slap shouldn't come into play much. I assume you're either using a hand-held remote or tethered shutter release. Some cameras have a mirror-up mode or two-stage shutter release, where the first click flips up the mirror, and the second trips the shutter.

The only way to see what the prints will look like is to get some made. I suspect that the full-size images will look quite nice when printed.

Edit: I see you said you zoomed in. Zoom lenses aren't as sharp as prime lenses for close-up work, although it would probably only be noticeable on the large pictures. I realized that the pictures you uploaded are bigger than I thought at first. For screen-friendly sizes, don't let the browser or back-end software resize your images for presentation. Do that yourself, and then sharpen the result just a little (1 pixel radius, 30% gain).

Numiven

Thanks...

I should have been clear, i zoom on the view finder to manual focussing, not on the lens. I use a 1:1 macro for this.

I PMed you too...

ricko

That is excellent coin photography....sure, the experts can offer suggestions to improve....but you have done extremely well already.... Great pictures...Cheers, RickO