What is neat is that is the purple haze on a $5 bill. Without magnification, it just looks like purple paper. and the other photo is Lincoln on the same bill.
Folks often ask about magnification and what is needed for showing varieties well. They get confused by the magnifications claimed for USB microscopes. Those scopes often state 100x or even 500x magnifications, but these are not optical magnifications. They include the digital magnification of "projecting" the digital image from the camera sensor to the monitor/display, which has much larger pixels than the camera. In reality, for coins, I find that 5x is a great starting point, and can show the full date/mintmark of a Lincoln Cent. I call this the "money shot". 10x can zoom-in to show the mintmark in more detail. 20x is about the highest magnification I would consider using for coins, and can show details of the mintmark itself. Here is a 1954-S RPM#4, taken at 20x to show the RPM in more detail:
Seriously, this thread is the best I've seen in 2017 and deserves to be a Featured Thread. The photographic skills that you guys are demonstrating is incredible. Keep it coming, I love it!
This is a coin that I would love to photo again, I believe this is a dropped element, cell phone pics, would love to try my hand in the Macro department. Marvelous photos Ya'll.
I know that these are not what you would think of as macro shots. But if you click on the images below to get the full resolution images of this 1943 Washington Quarter, I think the details will blow you away. Take a look at the flow lines in the silver caused by what (I would guess) are mid die state dies. My favorite areas are the throat of Washington on the obverse and on the reverse the eagle's wings and the field between the eagle's right wing and it's head. These images are taken directly from my camera and cropped. They are not resized and they have not been sharpened.
Hey, can any of you guys tell me if I have any RPMs or anything on this one? NGC says its a 1964D, but I think it is a D/S
Struck through canvas/cloth? Very dramatic! There's another thing you can do with macro images to help in understanding/attributing/communicating with folks about die varieties...animations. Below is an animation of a 1955-S BIE, in two die stages. The stage with just the B_E is Cohen B149, but the stage with a 3/4 full BIE is a new discovery of mine. I call it B150 but it was never listed in Cohen. The animation technique shows clearly how the break/chip progressed. It appears the B150 portion of the break occurred very soon after this B149 coin was struck since there is very little additional die wear. Give the image a little while to load as it is 4MB.
I bought a 1905 20 francs today, On search for toned gold, found this one with a strike through, maybe a loss of lamination.
Here is the reverse of a 1951 Franklin. It has a massive DDR, which I discovered (now listed as DDR-005). This DDR is easily obvious with the naked eye - no magnification needed.
That is very cool!! Congrats on the discovery, it's something I am certainly going to keep my eye's open for. When did you discover it?