sale photos compared to coins in hand

The first one is original Hirsch photo, second the link to their previous provenance ie: Nomos 2009 lot#39 photo=which my coin is. However, you and Al are correct/ Hirsch photo is not the same coin! I have no idea, why they would not have taken a photo of it, or used the Nomos photo? I could see this type of thing with a fly by night firm, but they are a prestigious auction house......
John

 

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That's BS! You should definitely talk with their complaints department.

 

Could you take a picture of your coin? The ex-Nomos FPL, ex-Mieza, ex-Nomos auction 7 coin is not the second coin in your post but is the same as the Hirsch coin:

Hirsch:


Nomos:

 

Here's the answer: the coin you posted is from the Nomos auction in 2009, lot #1, not the Nomos FPL where it was lot 39 (and later appeared in Nomos 7).

So, your coin is the one in my post above, not the one in the second image in your original post.

 

I'm not a fan of CNG's photos of bronzes. They lose a lot of the beauty of the patina when they desaturate their photos and take some patina with a wide range of hues down to something that's almost black and white. Thankfully I can usually find photos elsewhere that confirm the real appearance of coins in question. The desaturation of the second coin is particularly bad because the red encrustations become some shiny blobs around the coin. I wasn't sure what that was when I saw CNG's photos but thankfully looking at the photos on Andrew McCabe's website & at an old Artemide sale confirmed that it was nothing abnormal.

 

I find that my pictures reflect the actual color of the coins better than most dealer photos. As I have practiced taking pics for over two years now my techniques also have improved.

 

I'm not sure how prestigious Hirsch are - there's a FB thread from earlier this year where the coin above photographed by Hirsch is described as a fake by a reliable source - it's good you got the original coin and not whatever that was!

https://m.facebook.com/groups/767332423353070?view=permalink&id=2410471545705808

 

I won't, because I like the coin better in hand than I expected from their photo.

 

As do I. I sometimes take up to 10 different photos of each side of the coin, in between changing lighting angles, background (black and white), adding diffusion, etc. It seems there are no hard and fast rules for the best photographs. I typically find that even though I do pinpoint metering, a black or white background renders completely different lighting and color attributes of the coin in the foreground. It seems to depend on the coin, I almost never can predict what will work best.

 

I think a lot of you are falling into the trap of thinking that 'how it looks like in hand' is some sort of static, visual "truth". It's often said that photos lie but the eye does too. Take your coin and look at it under fluorescent light and then in natural light and your brain delivers the illusion that they look the same when you can easily tell they don't. Consider also that when you look at a coin typically you move your hand in the light creating a mental composite of the coin's appearance. A photograph can't tell you much about the nature of its reflectivity or, for most people, even its true color gamut. Even if the coin shot was perfectly color balanced chances are you'd still see it in your crappy, color un-calibrated Costco monitor making the effort pointless.

As for CNG, their photos are heavily post-processed and while I personally like the effect - especially in silver - it isn't without its drawbacks. In my opinion the algorithm used results in some loss of detail which posterizes the images to a subtle degree. Again, the effect can be pleasing but on some coins you could get a "romanticized" version that doesn't look very lifelike.

Here's two examples that were taken side by side at CNG about ten years ago (top one is CNG's, bottom mine) using the same lighting but different cameras and post-processing algorithms.

Rasiel

 

+1

There was a time some of the big sellers used expensive coin lighting systems that simulated at least to some degree axial lighting. These photos reproduced well on paper but are not fashionable today judging from the number of you that have posted very directional lighted examples as better than the dealer's glare filled image. I don't think these images are the result of postprocessing but just a type of lighting different than most of us have at home.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/136993-there-is-no-truth-
there-is-only-perception
Gustave Flaubert

“There is no truth. There is only perception.”

― Gustave Flaubert

If Flaubert is correct, his statement can not be true but we can choose to accept it as true or not as we see fit.

Being a philosopher is a hard life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_of_philosophers

 

My perception is that Flaubert's coin drawings kinda sucked.



Okay, so mine wouldn't have been much better, and that's the Truth. I do have an example of the coin, though. And a camera.



Flaubert apparently made a bunch of coin sketches in his notebook when he visited the coin cabinet of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 1860 and spent the day there with Henry Cohen. He was doing research for his set-in-Carthage novel, Salammbo.

"348 BCE Plato either died while being serenaded by a Thracian flute-playing girl, or at a wedding feast."

I think I'm very much a believer in the Platonic school of death.

 

Could he not have died "....while being serenaded by a Thracian flute-playing girl...at a wedding feast."

One is not exclusive of the other, is it?