Hey guys, I just came back from the Greater Atlanta Coin Show, and I picked up a PCGS MS64 1883 O Morgan with some amazing dark rainbow colors and textile toning, but I'm having a really hard time taking pictures of it. Thanks for any tips on taking pictures of dark coins!
Take the best pictures you can and then use photo software to make the pictures look like it does in-hand.
With dark coins, you want to make sure there is plenty of light on the coin, but you also want to make sure there is enough contrast. My best advice is: give it a shot, upload the pics you can take. Let us give suggestions based on that. We need something to start from. We don't really know how to help you improve until we see what you have right now.
Try photographing with a dark background and plenty of neutral light, then adjust the exposure of your camera to where it is balanced and natural but not over exposed.
Start without the camera. Close one eye. Hold the coin at roughly the camera's working distance from your opened eye. Keeping the angle and distance from your eye constant, move around in the room light until you see the colors you want. Look to see where the coin is relative to the light. Rotate the coin around the axis between your eye and the coin, as if rotating it on your copy stand base, in case there are advantageous views due to the shape of the coin or it being slightly tilted in the holder. Put the coin under the camera and duplicate the light position. This actually works better than it sounds like it would.
Thank you for the help! I followed your tips, but I still can't get good pictures. I photographed a coin with slightly similar toning to show you how dark this coin is with a phone. The first picture is of the coin I do not have trouble with, and it is just a reference. Both coins were taken with the lights at 12 o'clock and 3 o'clock. This picture is my setup. I use two IKEA lights with bright white lights (I can't remember the specs and brightness) about 2 feet above the table. For the background, I use a clean white sheet of paper. For a stand, I use a $25 penny box, which is just the right height to not get in the way too much and still get good detail of the coins. My camera is just a simple iPhone 6. And here is the coin I'm having trouble with. The reverse is really bright and has a nice soft edge of yellow toning, which makes it pop out more. The reverse is easy to capture correctly, but the obverse seems to be fully covered by a layer of yellow toning, which really darkens the obverse. The whole left side is covered with an amazing neon green, pink, and yellow color, but as you can see, I can't get all the color in. If you look at the denticles from the third star right of the date all the way up to the E, they have neon outlines because the color goes all the way around. The area of the date is bright green similar to the color captured and all the devices have beautiful outlines of slightly different colors based on the amount of time they have been toning. Also, it has some nice textile toning from her cheek up to "LIBERTY", to the right of the date, and at the top in "BUS" of "PLURIBUS", and I want to capture that as much as possible And finally here are the two coins next to each other with the two lights at the same height above them and centered to be right above the label. None of these pictures have been tweaked for anything, and they are just the best I could get raw. I'm sorry for the delay, I had some work to do. Thank you again for any help!
