!894-O Morgan that needs a bath.

Hello everybody. Today I was looking through my coins and I noticed some white spotting on one of my Morgans and I was wondering if it would be a good idea to give some of them an ultrasonic bath with mild detergents. I am new to collecting and any advice would be greatly appreciated. I am including some pictures of the coin thank you.

 

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Leave it alone. Those white patches are wear marks. It's perfect just the way it is

 

If you don't have any experience restoring coins I suggest not doing anything.

 

When silver wears down, the wear spots are white, but not lustery.

There is no way you will remove the white stuff. It's there because of wear.

 

Yes - anything you do to it will probably lessen it's value - nice circulated coin - leave it as such!!

 

I don't see anything that a cleaning will improve. Possibly lightly cleaned at some point, then spent time in a kraft envelope. ( Folks, feel free to disagree with me on that ). It looks quite nice now.

 

Can't add much except using detergent on a Morgan isn't a great idea. I would try the ultrasonic bath with distilled water then acetone if u feel the need to get froggy with a Morgan

 

It's a perfectly normal Morgan, and a better date at that. Leave it alone.

 

White balance is our friend..........

Other than that, nice photos.

 

I hate Morgans that appear like copper........

 

Looks great, did you change the filter?

 

The White Balance is off on the original images; green18 corrected that in postprocessing by eliminating all color. In the real world, I suspect it looks more like this:



....which is how it ought to look at that level of wear.

 

I will not do any cleaning. At the same time, I am trying to take better pictures and after reading the featured post the other day I have learned a lot. The actual coin looks more like What Green did to it. My light is not bright enough. I am using a 10W LED @750 Lumens.

 

Thank you, after reading super Dave's posting and then yours today, I took my cheapest camera which I believe is a 14MP Nikon point and shoot with a light I purchased which I see now is not bright enough, I gave it a shot.

 

That's more light than I use in my photography; my Jansjos are 2w each for a combined total of 140 lumens. Adjustability is key for making that work, though - for a coin like this using those lights, I'd be exposing down around 1/15 @ ISO200, maybe 400. Let me know the model of your Nikon; I'll be happy to offer camera-specific hints. It shoots nice sharp shots, for sure. Once we get White Balance figured and lighting tweaked there's no reason you can't offer gradable images here.

 

Heck, when shooting coins I like my ISO set at 64.......

 

I'm throwing so little light at the matter that ISO100 is usually the best I can do unless I do a bathroom trip while the exposure is happening, just to while away the time.

My XS - even as old as it is - does not introduce visible noise in a coin shot below ISO800.

 

Dave thank you for your reponse. I Learned a lot from your featured posting. Thank you for that. My camera is a Nikon S6100 wh

I set the camera to macro automatic and adjusted the zoom.

 

That's what I love about my D-810 (Nikon).......I can go low end or I can go high end........with a minimum of 'noise'.

 

The bad news is, your camera offers very little manual adjustment. The good news is, it sure doesn't look like it really needs it.

You do have the ability to create a Custom White Balance setting; this is the next thing to look at in your manual. What appears here is about as good as can be done with a single light source; have you the ability to get it any more vertical above the coin? The preferable "look" is with the light at 10:00 or 2:00-ish with the coin straight up as you'd inspect it, but if it'll help with lighting there's nothing stopping you from rotating coin or camera, and then correcting the rotation in postprocessing.

It's always preferable to crop anything but coin out of the final image, and present the coin unrotated, as you'd like to look at it in-hand.

That's Nikon's finest offering for coin photography - EFSC, no antialiasing filter and tetherable. Terrific camera. If/when I can afford a fullframe, that will likely be the camera because away from the bellows, outdoors, I actually prefer Nikon.