Post your Lincolns!

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Wow!

 

Great pictures, I can tell those are more colorful than they look in the pictures. How many would mistakenly call that an AU coin?

Thanks for sharing, we don't see near enough pictures of memorial cents.

 

I'm having trouble showing the true colors. I need better lighting and more practice time.

 

Just cheat like I do and supplement the pics with a couple angled ones.

 

Simply angling your light and camera angle does wonders for showing color:

 

You can also leave the coin and lens flat and just angle the lights instead.

 

Thank you. That helped out tremendously...

 

1995-S Proof

 

I use that method too, I can move my light in infinite ways....that's really best way to take coin pictures. Fixed lighting just doesn't work well IMO.

 

You got me thinking I should do this.

Then I realized I kind of do! I both tilt the coin and adjust the lighting to bring out the colors. I have to tilt it a little because I can only get the lights near to an on-axis position above the coin, and then they hit the camera. Tilting towards the lights gets me that last tiny adjustment.

Then I don’t move the lights themselves, but I rotate the coin under them, so it’s really the same thing. Each position lights the color a little differently. If you are taking a single image just pick the angle and color you like best.

 

Exactly! If I'm after single pictures, I usually move my light, check, move the light check, over and over and over until I feel the picture will represent the coin properly. When I can't get everything, I cheat by using camera/light angles though! I'm far from a pro like robec but I feel my pictures are good enough for my purposes.

You have one problem now though, your images are so good they bring out every little flaw. One of my beefs with internet coin pictures - they are merely representations of a coin. 90% of people tend to under-grade using pictures because light cuts through the patina exposing things you may not actually see in hand.

We all have to remember this: EYE APPEAL RULES THE DAY

 

Dude....YOU'RE ROCKING NOW! I'd call it a day, have a glass of chianti and fire up a cigar! Great job!

 

I’ll try to do worse! Sure, I joke about it, but I absolutely see the point. What feels like a warm glow in hand is resolved to each of dozens of tiny color patches in a photo.

Some dealers use very dark exposures to try to suppress this, but those become nearly black and white photos.

Add in that coins are either seen in hand or under a 5x loupe. On my monitor a 800x800 pixel image may be 8 inches tall, giving over 10x magnification. This may just too darn much unless for doing a forensic study of how the die reformed the surface of the planchet.

The LED lights I use are both strong and close. I agree wholly. They just cut right through what you would see as the top layer under ambient light.

I may have to experiment with weaker or more distant lights. After all, we want to have the same emotional response to the picture as we do to the coin in hand. Just easier to see, perhaps.