Photos for ID

@arnoldoe , those are very nice. What is the lighting used, and distance from phone to coin?

 

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Just the lamp above the table, + for distance i just use the digital zoom about 3/4 of the way and find whatever looks best.

 

Interesting. But what is the distance from your phone to the coin? How many inches (or cm)? I'm curious about how well you are able to focus the camera.

 

Here is a set of pics of the same coin shot with my iPhone 8, with a light and dark background, first of each is the unaltered image after cropping and resizing for upload, the second pic adjusts the brightness and/or contrast to take the coin closer to its look in hand. The lighting was with a pair of desk lamps with "Daylight" (5600K) color temperature:
First set, phone was mounted 10cm (lens to subject):

The coin I chose is very dark billon. Bright silver shoots well, but I wanted to see what happens if you are shooting a bronze or low quality billon.
DARK background

Unaltered normal exposure:


Reducing the brightness with a dark background gave the image that is easiest to examine.


Second set phone was handheld ~ 10cm (lens to subject)
WHITE background:

Detail is lost before adjustment.


Brightening the image and reducing contrast made it readable.


Of the four pics, the last one gives the closest render of what it looks like in hand.

The phone gives acceptable images, but using a camera gives more flexibility for image control. Post editing took about the same time either way, but my camera setup is permanently "up" and always ready to shoot.

 

Around 6 inches maybe

 

"Bright white backgrounds can fool auto exposure routines to make dark coins too dark."

This is remedied by setting the exposure meter to a smaller sampling area. Obviously this is not a cell phone setting that can be adjusted but any dedicated camera has this option.

A white background aids in publishing and is the reason every single auctioneer uses this color excepting rare occasions where a dramatic effect is sought.

 

I have here a couple images I kind of cheated on. I just posted a couple days ago a denarius of Caracalla, a pretty small coin. Some members both here and on another site I posted them, felt the images were not good enough for purposes of authenticating. Well, I do know how to use an SLR and macro lenses so I took pictures of the coin, went to the drug store, turned them into paper prints, then came home and took pictures of the prints with the cell phone. I didn't pop the sd card into my desk top as it is inhabited by several poltergeist who would use this , or any other novelty, to wreak havoc on my computer. Anyway, this is what I got and it does provide some interesting detail, warts and all. Look at the tin y Victory in the hand of Roma on the reverse.

 

Nice thread, informative.. Thank you.

 

When I first started collecting I was using a phone camera. I didn't share many of those pictures here because they were just terrible and I felt embarrassed seeing all your nice photos compared to mine. Then I got a decent digital camera and I took thousands of pictures with it but I just kept thinking they could be better with a better camera.
About a year ago my sister lent me her dslr and the photos are much nicer but I still feel they could be better.
I've concluded that no matter what camera I use I just suck at taking pictures.