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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;messydesk, post: 4862706, member: 1765&quot;]I&#039;m surprised I just ran across this thread today.&nbsp; Lots of interesting points made here.&nbsp; With no big shows since FUN, my professional coin photography biz has screeched to a halt.&nbsp; The only shots I&#039;ve taken lately have been my own.&nbsp; I&#039;ll comment on a bunch of stuff I&#039;ve seen here all at once.</p><p><br /></p><p>My setup is a Nikon D610, usually with a 200 mm macro, sometimes with a 105 mm (larger objects and slabs), or even a 55 mm macro (much larger objects).&nbsp; Since almost everything I shoot is slabbed, axial lighting is not useful for me.&nbsp; The closest I&#039;ve come to something like it is my makeshift white paper shroud crammed onto the end of my lens with the lights pointed at it.&nbsp; The built-in lens hood of the 105/4 Micro-Nikkor keeps that lens from flaring, and the 200/4 just doesn&#039;t flare.</p><p><br /></p><p>Regarding whether or not post-processing is not photography, so what?&nbsp; If you have an end-product in mind that&#039;s not possible to capture with the camera, post-processing is just another tool in the chain that is used to produced your finished product.&nbsp; You still have to start out with the best picture you can get out of your camera to be able to work with it better.&nbsp; &quot;Juicing&quot; a picture is often cited as an example of bad post-processing.&nbsp; It&#039;s bad for two reasons -- you can tell it&#039;s too much, and it doesn&#039;t look like the coin.&nbsp; Of course, you can &quot;juice&quot; a picture without post-processing by setting the saturation too high on your camera.&nbsp; Same result, different toolset.&nbsp; Do I do off-camera exposure, highlight, shadow, and saturation adjustment?&nbsp; Absolutely!&nbsp; Can you tell where I did it?&nbsp; Probably not.&nbsp; Does it look like the coin?&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; All of this is just as much part of photography as burning, dodging, adjusting development times or chemistry were back in the day.</p><p><br /></p><p>One of your biggest friends when taking and processing photos is the histogram.&nbsp; It clearly shows you how much data you&#039;re losing in shadows and highlights, what can be recovered later, and to what extent you can mess with exposure in post-processing.</p><p><br /></p><p>Black backgrounds are what I prefer, but I can see white backgrounds working better in web pages that have a predominantly white background, such as eBay.&nbsp; I&#039;ve thought of using a transluscent stage with a sub-stage colored light to create masks for automating cutting out coins that aren&#039;t perfectly round, but it doesn&#039;t seem worth it to me at this time.&nbsp; If someone came to me with a box of hammered coins, I&#039;d probably think differently, but nobody&#039;s coming to me with anything right now, so I&#039;m not really motivated to do it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Finally (for this post), don&#039;t underestimate the importance of a good monitor.&nbsp; Color calibrated, 99+% sRGB gamut is what you want.&nbsp; Inexpensive laptop display?&nbsp; Low color gamut, hard to calibrate effectively, even with a color calibration tool.&nbsp; Phone?&nbsp; Not sure you can calibrate these at all.&nbsp; &quot;I have a Mac, therefore it&#039;s perfect?&quot;&nbsp; Nope.&nbsp; Just got a good deal on a 4K HDR display for $300 and it looks great?&nbsp; Probably not.&nbsp; If you are serious about using a good monitor, buy one based on customer reviews at B&amp;H Photo, not Amazon or Best Buy.&nbsp; If you want to calibrate your monitor, use a calibration tool, and not your eyes, which will adjust to whatever color cast you throw at them over time.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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