Trying to improve my photography!

I took advantage of a link posted here previously to try and improve my photographs strictly using my iPhone. Here is my first attempt, with a couple of subjects from Grandma's velvet pouch in her jewelry box. Let me know what I can try to improve photography wise. Also, I'm trying to decide if these coins are special, or just nice old bullion pieces.
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They aren’t that bad if these are your first tries. I use a similar setup to what the link said to use. Only I’m using 2 small led gooseneck lights. Here’s some of my iPhone pictures


When I first started taking iphone pictures, they looked more like this. Reminds me of yours.

Practice and playing around with lighting are what makes the biggest difference.
Mr_Spud
I get it Gold is hard for me to photo. I fight color, and definition. No coin is easy to get that in hand look.
I ended up moving the lights down like this and angle them around until the coin lights up how I want it before taking the pictures. I use either an empty pill bottle or the scissor jack thingy to hold the iPhone and use the timer so the picture doesn’t come out blurry. But putting the lights low and right next to the camera lens and then twisting them around at different angles to get the coin to light up was the most important thing that helped. Cropping the images and placing them side by side Trueview style helps keep the images small enough that they don’t get all pixelated on larger monitors. I’m using an IPhone 12 Pro so may be able to go bigger with newer models, not sure




Here’s a few more examples of my iPhone images taken with this setup. These were after I had taken pictures of about 100 or so coins. The ones I took before that sometimes didn’t look as good. But after you go through that learning curve, it gets real quick and easy.
Mr_Spud
I lost the kitchen table to a jigsaw puzzle board, so I moved to my cramped desk and played around with some side lighting from multiple sources, vice direct axial. Still having trouble getting the phone to accurately acquire the gold tone.

Looking better already 👍🏻
Mr_Spud