GTG: 1901 Indian Head Cent

The winner is @SuperDave. This was a tough one.. Not just the guessing of the grade, but the photography was a challenge. The plastic on this particular holder did not reflect the light the way most do. It diffused the light across the surface in an odd way which washed out the image quite a bit. Consequently it caused the coin to not reflect the light showing off the luster as much as it should have. Anyway, the Indian cent is an ANACS MS64 BRN.

 

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The optical characteristics of the slab were an advantage here - the plastic simply disappeared in your images. I had to assume it was slabbed because you positioned this thread as a GTG. With that in mind, though, an added layer of complexity is imposed on the person evaluating the images, knowing there's the potential for slab plastic to alter the contrast and "reflectivity" of the actual coin.

Terrific images, man. It really doesn't get a lot better than this. Just for the record, what'd you use for aperture here? When shooting through slabs, I generally open the aperture even more than normal - f/5.6 or wider - to trade depth of field for better ability to make the slab "disappear" because at wider apertures it's even farther from the focal plane. That doesn't work well with 100% crops since the lack of DoF shows clearly, but with the "sharpness bonus" when you downsize large images, you end up with a better full-face image.

 

Thanks Dave. I shot it at f8, I was having a slight depth of field problem due to the magnification at anything lower. I nearly filled the frame and the coin was set fairly deep in the holder. Here is the un-edited image reduced to 1/5th of full resolution. Note the incredibly diffuse reflections of the lights.

 

Yeah, I see what you mean. Even in direct light - and you barely missed the edge on the top left light - the slab darn near looks matte. Should have been a lot more contrasty than that. At that point, it becomes appropriate to feed in a little contrast adjustment in post, because that's what the coin looks like under direct observation.

I like it. You can fix "bland" and "diffuse" without being dishonest to the coin.

 

That's the trick.. Trying to keep it looking the way it looks in hand. And the unedited image is way to flat and lifeless compared to the coin in hand. It's been one of the weirdest slab's I've tried to shoot through. But I'm happy with how it turned out.