(Coin photography) lighting question

Yes.

 

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I know that was the 'bottle' talkin' Kurt..........

 

Yuppers, but be sure to set the 'white balance' to 'tungsten'.......

 

Or if your camera has a temperature setting set it to 3000°K

 

Nah, when I get hammered, I either lose the ability to spell, or the interest to correct on edit.

 

Does anyone have an opinion on ring lights?

 

I would think ring lights would be terrible, but I have not tried it myself. The light coming from all angles would reduce the shadows on the surface that you get from a 10 and 2 arrangement. The shadows are critical for imparting the illusion of depth that makes a coin photo realistic.

I use 10 and 2 almost exclusively, and also move them slightly from their established positions to get a pleasing balance between lighting the fields and the devices. I am currently working through a series of Lincoln cents and rarely touch the light positions between coins. If I switch over to proofs or another series, then the lights will need minor adjustments. Unfortunately, what I see on my monitor is badly unfocused, so some of the results are guesswork.

My lights are also Jansjo from IKEA, with a double layer of tissue paper taped to each one as a diffuser.

 

Ring lights, ALL BY THEMSELVES, are a bad idea for most coin photography. However, a ring light can be modified by blacking off part of the ring, say with fully opaque tape, to create an effective multi-light system in a ring.

 

Ring lights have their niche, but keep in mind the eternal struggle of coin photography is managing to correctly depict luster while also showing the whole surface of the coin in sufficient light to sharply reveal the details. The two goals are essentially incompatible, and the reason that diffusion has been explored in such depth. You need the individual direct light for luster, but you need the diffusion to avoid hotspots (and, more importantly, dark spots).

Ring lights essentially prevent the depiction of luster.

 

What he said. But if you already HAVE a ring light, try monkeying around with it as I suggested in post #28. If I didn't already have a ring light on hand, I'd go another way. Ring lights can do some really funky portraiture, if you're into that sort of thing.

 

Since my recent move, I'm getting to the point where establishing a coin photography niche mini-studio is crawling higher on the "to do" list.

 

This was created using a ring light:



It's perhaps not the best image for grading but from an aesthetic standpoint it's one of my all-time favorite pics.

 

Which brings up one of the "eternal questions", should proofs be lit to create light devices and dark fields, or vice versa? This example punts to "both".

 

From a standpoint of strict objective grading, I'm a fan of dark devices and light fields. The opposite tends to overemphasize random specks of dirt in the fields.

 

Back in the day (before digital photography), my favorite proof coin photography technique was with a Nikon Micro-Nikkor with a black card on the end of the lens to prevent hot reflections, and a vellum cylinder around the coin, which was lit by four lights at 2,4,8, and 10 o'clock positions on a Polaroid MP4 copy stand, using Kodachrome Type A film (40 ISO) with juuuust the right Kodak Wratten gelatin filters on the lens to perfectly balance the lamps.

Then I'd fire them off to Kodak's Rockville, MD lab and wait two or three days, and VOILA, rocking color slides with deep rich black fields and diffuse white devices. They looked like Rick Tomaska's images in his book on cameo proofs.

"Those werrrre the days my friend,
We thought they'd never end;
We sang and danced forever and a day..."

 

As others have said, it depends on the coin what light arrangement is best. It may also depend on the phase of the moon, odd behaviors by Congress, the vagaries of St. Elegius, and the daily arrangement of hog entrails.

In other words, I recommend that you always experiment.

FWIMBW, I generally use Ott lights. I use 1, 2 or 3. For circulated copper coins, I find that one light, fairly high and a few degrees off center, often gives the clearest images.

 

For what it's worth, I started out with 'true light', employing Verlux lamps, but I found them cumbersome and unwieldy.........

 

I use 4 jansjos diffused with double ping pong balls. Mostly at 10, 2, 5 and 7.

 

Bless you Dave.......

Ping Pong Balls elude me though, but done up in the right circumstances, they could be employed as filtering.

 

They are surgically altered to fit snugly over the lens.