Not bad for your first images. Only thing I can suggest is play around with lighting; use different lighting sources, mess around with the positioning of your lights, etc. Otherwise, they're looking good.
Looks good! A couple tips: -Use a tripod (if you're not already). -Use full manual mode. This will give you much more control over the exposure and the depth of field. -Use manual focusing (if possible). -Set the ISO to minimum sensitivity (lowest number). This will give you a much better-quality image.
You might pull the lighting in a bit closer to the lens. Looks like you have the lights at about 10 and 2. The SLR gives you more room to play with the lighting.
I might add moving a bit farther away from the coin may be helpful in conjunction with Larry's comments (which are dead-on, IMO). Lens?
I'm curious about the lens as well. I highly recommend a dedicated macro lens. I bet you could even find an inexpensive manual-focus only lens for a Nikon that would perform quite well - for macro, autofocus is more trouble that it's worth. If you are using a tripod, I recommend using live view (or whatever Nikon calls it, I'm not a Nikon guy) for perfect focus. Here are a couple of my most recent shots from CRH: Taken with a Canon 40D, Sigma 150mm macro, tripod, F/11, ISO100, 1/6 shutter, lit with a desk lamp from the left and a piece of white cardstock on the right for some fill light.
Agreed. And make sure you change the AutoISO setting, which I think by default in ON. You want to change it to OFF for coin pics, and then set ISO at "100". This way the camera will slow down the shutterspeed instead of bumping up the ISO. As long as you are using a tripod, long shutterspeed wont be an issue.
Also, you seem to have some disctracting stuff BEHIND some of the coin photos. Try to avoid that too.
Agreed, I would personally use a black piece of paper behind the slab to eliminate the background. I think black does a good job of setting off most coins.
