I have a good friend who's always trying to help and he just happens to have several cameras including the Coolpix that I know he never uses. Thanks for the idea.
That's some great work and a whole hooter of a lot easier than my overkill idea. I have some white coroplast I could use, but it might reflect wrong. I'll look at it when I'm feeling better. Thanks for your help.
I've also seen some inexpensive light boxes that include led strip lights and different colored backgrounds starting at less than less than $15, you can spend a lot on more elaborate set ups, keeping it simple and easy is good for some people.
Sam, when I first started photographing my coins I struggled to find a decent setup to use with my cell phone or a cheap digital camera. I started out with the setup below and eventually moved up to a system that I purchased from http://macrocoins.com This cost effective setup is nothing more then a empty windshield fluid bottle with the top cut off and a small rectangle cut into the bottom through which to snap the photo. It sits on a dark ceramic tile to provide contrast and I used two lamps to provide lighting. The windshield fluid bottle is slightly frosted in composition so you won't need any diffusion on the lamps. I took a few quick shots for demonstration purposes and admittedly I didn't spend a lot of time trying to capture the best photo. In the end though it's a cheap setup that you can play around with until you move up to a better solution. Joe
That's brilliant. I tried 15 and a half variations of everything everyone suggested and what has worked best for me so far is I bought a cheap microscope (even after being warned it could show too much detail), which was cheap enough it can't possibly show too much detail. Then, depending on ambient light at any given moment, I may or may not use a sheet of different degrees of frost or wax paper to diffuse and hopefully distribute lighting. It's easy to get as much or as little detail as I want including adjusting the light to highlight (or not) parts or all. My wife had the paper for diffusing and the microscope was an Amazon USB lightning deal for about $20. Your stuph would be more portable so you can count on me putting one together. Thanks for helping.
