I was tired of cleaning up the garage so I decided to see what I could do to improve some photos of old coins. I selected three that need work but failed to improve two of them so I'm only batting .333 today. The others will get another try on another day. This Syracuse AR hexas is my lightest coin at 0.05g but it is so thin that it is larger in diameter than some of my coins that are a full 0.1g. I do not consider my scales accurate to .01 as advertised so all this is approximate anyway. The coin is not round but roughly 5x6mm across. In addition to being thin, the coin is exfoliated and has lost half of its surface silver. It is not plated but many coins have a compressed outer layer that is a bit different than the center of the coin. On a coin this small, this difference can be significant. The coin was struck very hard making quite a depression on the reverse. My previous photo attempts did not show the textural differences as clearly as I wanted so this was a matter of wiggling lights until I saw what I had in mind. This one shows the areas of exfoliation more clearly than previous attempts. Does it look more like the coin? Yes but only if you are looking at the coin under a microscope. In hand, you just don't see something this small as clearly as a huge enlargement. Perhaps this photo is best viewed on a computer monitor if you stand back a six or eight feet. I like the way the lighting suggests the third dimension of the rough surfaces and incuse. After I finished combining the images, I compared it to my old photos and discovered that I oriented the reverse the opposite of previous attempts. There is no way to tell which way should be up on a two dot reverse like this but this reminds me that I should have looked first. You can not rotate the image to correct this since the light direction would no longer match the obverse. Can't win them all!
That obverse looks like that coin Steve shows at times with the head drawn in by hand. Actually the image looks great. These tiny coins can be a bugger.
I think the photo looks great too. Having a hard time will all my tiny coins. A trick to having good photos is to look at them after some wine.
