Trying the coin picture thing...gtg

Alright, I have a lot of work to do before I can take decent and consistent photos (at the moment these are shot while holding the camera and i would like to get a rig set up so The camera would be in a static position). Anyway let me know what you think, I took a picture of this common date, while your at it, see if you can guess the grade.

 

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Really nice coin. My grade would be a 64 - only because I can't get a feel for the over all luster on the coin, especially with that very last picture of the reverse. The reverse makes want to say BN, but from the pictures it could be either. I do see some minor small hits in certain areas, but the cheek looks really smooth and nothing too distracting. To me this is a toughie to grade from the pictures. Just my humble opinion.

 

As far as the photos, the most obvious one is the white balance. Do you have the capability to set a white balance on the camera, rather than having it guess? That would improve things a lot.

 

Pretty IHC. I don't study them, so a GTG would be just that...a guess.

 

I might, I have not got into all the little things like that with the camera but i will have a look now that it has been brought up. Is it just as stated? "White balance", is this what I would be looking for?

 

Ok, so this is what I have for color balancing, just a grid that I can move to adjust it. Is this what you are refering to?

 

Usually there's a white balance setting where you pick the kind of light you're in: daylight, clouds, tungsten, fluorescent, etc. It looks to me like you're under tungsten light, so you could try that setting. Then you may have a "custom white balance" option (ie, none of the above, let me make up my own), which is a bit more complicated to set, but will exactly match your situation if you do that.

Once you set the white balance per your lighting setup, you should be able to use that for all the shots unless you change your lighting.

Matching it by eye, what that image seems to offer, is another option, though if you have to do it for every shot it could get tedious.

 

Thank you for the input Dave. I believe i found it, it includes the following settings...

Incandescent

Fluorescent

Direct sunlight

Flash

Cloudy

Shade

My guess is this would have to be adjusted according to the light I would be using?

 

Exactly. So the typical answer is to always make your own light, and not trust the various lights in the room, those coming through windows, etc. So for example if you use two gooseneck lamps with incandescent bulbs to light the coin, and then keep the shades closed as much as possible, the light is going to be very close to the camera's "incandescent" setting.

So it doesn't have a "custom white balance" setting? If not, I would just use that incandescent, or fluorescent if that's what your lights are, setting.

If it's not perfect in the image, then you can always make adjustments later in a graphics program. But it is nice to not have to manually adjust the color on every image.

 

I'd throw a guess of MS64RB at that...but it's a bit of a wild guess...

 

64

 

Yes it does have custom adjustments. Actually I can pick a preset and then customize that. For example, i could select the incandescent setting, then tweek it to my liking with a graph sort of like what i posted above. This goes for all other settings as well.

I am seeing that the coins i have taken photos of start representing theirselves better when I adjust more towards the blue spectrum. The coin above is reddish brown on the obverse, and the reverse is more brown with red showing through. When I adjust that picture towards blue, it darkens and creates a more of "in hand" view of the coin

 

One thing you could look for in your camera manual is the ability to snap a photo of a white piece of paper to calibrate your white balance. I just started doing this with my relatively cheap Canon camera and had very good results with coin photography after that. Basically I go into a certain mode, snap a photo of a piece of white paper, and that tells the camera "this color should be white" (even though it may be a little brown or whatever from the lighting situation), and then future pictures taken of coins will look color-accurate.

 

Agree completely. Matching white is a lot easier than "is this brown the right brown"

 

Here's a snippet from my camera's user manual, FYI. I'm including here in case it helps you find a similar feature within yours.

 

I do have a setting for this also! I did not know how much affects a photo! Looks like I really have to get back in my user manual and learn this cameras functions. So far The replies have been awesome and very informational, i have learned a lot in a short period! I feel like I have accomplished something today!

A quick question to the camera users, how do you stage your shooting area, ie.... coin placement, camera placement and so on. I know my quality will improve if I can mount the camera to something to shoot vertical instead of horizontal.

 

Gonna say 65 rb

 

Really tough to tell the luster from those photos, it looks very clean but I'm gonna say MS64+ RB

 

which pictures are more accurate?

 

@ThinnPikkins to answer your question about staging, I just place my coin on my desk (horizontally) and then hold my camera above it looking down. So I don't have a fancy rig or anything. I put my camera into macro mode (so it can focus on close items) and turn on the flash, and then I wrap a few layers of tissues around the flash to diffuse it (otherwise the coin behaves like a mirror and the picture is way too bright). Experiment until the end result is accurate with what your eye sees. Here's a recent example where I used this technique.