I agree. I have always thought that your coin showed turreted. They are turrets if I have ever seen them and mine clearly has no turrets. RIC has been known to be wrong.
It is turreted but yours is worn so it looks like hair. You can see it on mine (click for bigger pic):
Very nice group of Flavians! My favourite is the PACI ORB Ephesian denarius. Can you make out a mint mark below the reverse bust? That would determine which exact RIC number it is.
Usually the auto function on a camera defaults to daylight so daylight LED's should work. The original photos made me think of fluorescents or grow lights. Whenever a camera has the option, manual white balance is worth the effort. You shot a reference photo of a white sheet of paper and tell the camera that is the definition of white. That usually does the trick but you can always weak colors in postprocessing if you wish. I have a tendency of making contrast low ruining the sparkle of coins. There are always little variations in dies. My similar coin has one larger towerbehind a wall with circles. These are things missed by collectos of coins mad from machine duplicated dies.
David, I now remember the discussion. I put this group of coins away and kind of forgot about it. I'm glad you chimed in to remind me of the die match to 1422. I will note it on the flip insert and change the designation. I really appreciate your knowledge and research. Thank you.
Doug, that is a beautiful coin you have. the sameness is why I sold all my US coins in favor of ancient and medieval coins. I have always had a problem with lighting of my coin photos. The only time I have had good results was with natural lighting. I will definitely play with the camera controls. I'm pretty sure it has white balance control. It's a very capable camera but the problem with it is its so darn small. It is worth working with though.
Yeah, I actually think the glow is from you, "beaming with pride", & rightfully so! Also, I'm with Jay re: dolphin/anchor! (Commenting as he continues his slide into the black hole, toward his first ancient.......)
I use a Nikon Coolpix and this thread has been SO educational for me. What more could you want? Interesting coins and advice how to photograph them. Thanks all!
I just shot this picture using the white balance adjustment on my coolpix and a bit of adjustment with the software to remove too much blue. A huge improvement.
That looks pretty good but it's a bit too bright. The coin has some tone in hand and is about half way between the two.
It's always a delicate balance to show the details and show what it looks like in hand. I never use a contrast tool to sharpen the image (I think that's cheating ), I try getting it with brightness and saturation.
I love Paint Shop Pro. Or rather, it's the only graphic editing program I know how to use. It's going to be a sad day when my old computer dies and I'm forced to find a new one. Here's a random recent pic of a not so easy to photograph coin that I think benefited with just a little tweaking on PSP. When we account for the fact that different monitors and screens on our various devices display at different relative levels of brightness and contrast (not to mention show colours in differing tones!), it's not surprising that we tend to see a great deal of variance in members' coin photographs here. I never quite know myself whether my pics display as too bright, too dark, or with too much or too little contrast on others' monitors.