Animation and Coin Photography

Thank you. It is ambitious, but I also find it very fun.

 

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Very cool thread- I need to try it!

 

My animations with just two frames were intentionally meant to be a lower bound, a starting point that is easy to achieve. More is better, but even with two frames the experience is significantly improved.

For study of varieties of deeper research into surface conditions, I have learned to post still images of the obverse and reverse as well. It's become a kind of personal style.

The choice of whether to move the coin, or to move the lights, and which angles to the camera and the lights are used, can give different effects. @messydesk and @jtlee321 have achieved dramatic results that are not like each other's and not like what I have done. You can emphasize luster or a forensic study of specific features.

Here is one with only three frames. The coin does not have any cartwheel luster, but does have some shininess. I don't know whether it means it was cleaned; I need other opinions. Does this help you understand the coin better?


For contrast, here is a different 1926 with normal luster.

 

Cameras have made huge strides, but as it turns out, eyes and brains have pretty much stayed the same. Our eyes and brains are wired to extract a huge amount of information from motion.

One of my grad-school projects was a program to demonstrate the concept of "structure from motion" in perception. The program displayed white points against a black background. Without motion, they looked like random spots; with motion, it was clear that they were distributed on a rotating 3D surface (a cone, a cylinder, or a sphere). In a still image, you needed quite a lot of points to tell which was which. With animation, you needed three.

That demo was extremely simple, but motion perception is anything but. Motion makes it easy to look past noise, quantization (low resolution or low number of colors/intensities), and foreground/background distractions. The animations in this thread show it a lot more clearly than any words I can put down.

Indeed it does. With an untoned silver or copper coin, you might lose very little information. With colorful toning, you'd have to sacrifice more -- but again, you'd gain it back, with interest, by engaging the structure-from-motion parts of the brain.

 

This makes perfect sense. By holding the relationship between the coin, its holder, and the camera constant, the scratches never move relative to the coin.

In the example from my first post in this thread you can find a holder scratch at the 2:00 position over the wing on the reverse. I changed the angle of the slab between the two shots. This changed the position of the scratch relative to the surface. The brain reconstructs this information to "float" the scratch above the coin.

Here it is again. Please expand it and look at the wing, even with the "A" in AMERICA. There are also some more over LIB.

 

Well, here's my first attempt. I'm not completely thrilled with it yet, but it is moving in the right direction. I need to figure out the lighting to show the mirrors properly - they are super flashy in hand.

 

I do like this one better. More frames, each for a shorter time. Still not perfect.... I will keep working on this.

Interesting tip... there's a 10MB file size cap here. Had to keep reducing it until I got below it.

 

I've done a couple of these. It takes a bit of work but it's sort of fun:

 

You can get around the 10MB limit if you have a place to host your image. My animated gif's are hosted on my websites server and I just link the image.

 

Best coin web hosting site... Www.Collectivecoin.com

 

I use animations quite a bit in variety comparisons. I find it helps a lot in attributions or in just understanding what's going on. I've also used the technique for overlays. I find the animated overlays to be a much more powerful tool than a static overlay. You can see some of my overlays at:

http://www.macrocoins.com/animations.html

Here is an example of a multi-stage BIE overlay animation on the 1955-S RPM-4, which in its terminal die state has the famous "Sausage BIE":

 

I've always enjoyed your overlays, rmp. Keep up the good work!

 

That's freaky! @2Old would probably like to see it whenever he drops in

 

I think it's the largest known BIE in the series